The streetcar rattles steadily as we roll along St. Charles Street, passing the Garden District’s great white mansions and wide boulevards spilling over with magnolia. As a novelist long fascinated by the Southern gothic, I’d come to New Orleans to learn something about the literary life of the city and what lurks behind its much romanticized debauchery and grandeur.
New Orleans is a mythologized place, known for its ghosts, its voodoo and vice, and the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina. The city is also home to a thriving contemporary literary culture, with two celebrated literary festivals, bookstores that anchor diverse communities, and an art scene that’s a symphony of poetry, jazz, and theater. For the literary-minded traveler, New Orleans needn’t be a city of writerly ghosts and haunted parlors: Its literary scene is pulsing, alive. Here, Uber drivers are poets and bartenders are urban chroniclers and novelists.
Here are eight ways to sample the best of New Orleans’s literary scene on your next visit.
Tennessee Williams & New Orleans Literary Festival
There’s no better time to visit than March to meet the city’s literary heavy-hitters. The Tennessee Williams & New Orleans Literary Festival, now 40 years running, is named in honor of the playwright who famously made New Orleans home for a stint. Most festival events are intimate, housed in Hotel Monteleone, a Beaux-Arts building where Williams, Ernest Hemingway, and Truman Capote were once guests. Talks with renowned local writers such as Maurice Carlos Ruffin and Louisiana Poet Laureate Gina Ferrara take place in historic ballrooms, and writers often stick around for a signing and a conversation at the on-site bookstore run by Octavia Books.
Given the festival’s ties to Tennessee Williams, don’t miss specialty panels hosted at the Williams Research Center, which houses archives related to Gulf South culture and literature. To cap off the day, catch a play by the Tennessee Williams Theatre Company of New Orleans or the small, independent Irene Collective, which puts on excellent productions in black-box theaters (most recently A Streetcar Named Desire at Big Couch in the Bywater neighborhood).
The New Orleans Book Festival
Journalist Vann R. Newkirk II of The Atlantic, author Sarah M. Broom, and poet Tracy K. Smith at the New Orleans Book Festival
Photo by William A. Morgan/Shutterstock
The biggest book festival in town, hosted on the uptown campus of Tulane University, occurs every March, and its free events are open to the public. Last year’s lineup included Booker Prize winner Salman Rushdie, cultural critic Imani Perry, poet Clint Smith, politician (and thriller author!) Stacey Abrams, documentarian Ken Burns, and legendary literary agent Amanda “Binky” Urban.
For those traveling with children, the festival’s Family Day offers a chance for young readers to meet children’s book authors, learn about manga from comic artist Misako Rocks, take part in workshops about creating courageous characters, and bring home free books to build their libraries.
Baldwin & Co. Bookstore
Take a walk up Esplanade Avenue from the French Quarter to find Baldwin & Co., a Black-owned independent bookstore that doubles as a community hub with a lovely outdoor courtyard. Baldwin & Co. has been a major cultural player in the New Orleans literary scene, hosting monthly book clubs and author talks (check out its event calendar before your visit). James Baldwin’s books are well stocked here, as are those of contemporary New Orleans authors.
Community Book Center
On Bayou Road is the heart of the Seventh Ward neighborhood, Community Book Center, run by the affectionately nicknamed Mama Vera. Community Book Center opened 40 years ago, when Vera Warren Williams purchased her first brick-and-mortar store after selling books out of the trunk of her car. The spacious, light-filled bookstore curates a selection of books by Black authors and also sells gifts and jewelry.
Well worth a visit down the street is Le Musée de f.p.c. (free people of color), a historic Greek revival residence with a collection of paintings, documents, and artifacts from the Gulf’s free people of color community. Finish your Seventh Ward visit with lunch at Pagoda Cafe, and enjoy breakfast tacos or sausage rolls at bright-teal picnic tables teeming with neighborhood locals.
Faulkner House Books
In the French Quarter, William Faulkner lived in the townhouse at 624 Pirate’s Alley, which is now a celebrated bookstore and private residence.
Photos by Kennedy Photo/Shutterstock
Sunset still feels far off when I meet local author Lavinia Spalding (a frequent Afar contributor) and take the ferry across the Mississippi to Algiers Point, the other side of New Orleans. We walk to the mansion that houses Saint Claire, chef Melissa Martin’s newest restaurant after the Mosquito Supper Club (also the name of one of her celebrated cookbooks).
Settled on the screened-in porch overlooking large oaks and green lawns, we dig into marinated shrimp and duck and andouille gumbo as Lavinia tells me her personal favorites for a literary tour of the city: Faulkner House Books in the French Quarter, where the walls are covered with manuscripts and the writer once lived; the Anne Rice house in the Garden District, once home of the author of Interview with a Vampire; and, for the nostalgic and cocktail-inclined, the Pontchartrain Hotel and its Bayou Bar, a famous haunt of Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote.
The Lower Ninth Ward
Climate is, of course, inextricably linked with stories of the Gulf South. After Hurricane Katrina made landfall, disaster came from the rising waters, a message rumbling through the city: “The levees are breached.”
Besides the many nonfiction accounts (think Dave Eggers’s Zeitoun) and novels (local author C. Morgan Babst’s The Floating World) chronicling the devastation of Katrina, some of the most affecting storytelling is emerging from the Lower Ninth Ward, the historically Black neighborhood most ravaged by the hurricane. Today, only one in five residents of the Lower Ninth Ward has been able to return home after displacement. The Lower Ninth Ward Living Museum presents oral histories commemorating the neighborhood, a testament that rebuilding efforts are not just physical but also cultural.
Latino heritage and literature in New Orleans
Local writer Christopher Romaguera, who also manages the legendary Spotted Cat Music Club, takes me to lunch at Coop’s Place on Decatur Street. Over rabbit and sausage jambalaya and fried catfish po’boy, Chris, who was born and raised in Miami but has made New Orleans home for 14 years, tells me the Latino culture of New Orleans is often overlooked—but there is a large Honduran immigrant community here that spans generations, due, initially, to New Orleans’s history as the United Fruit Company’s main shipping port. He points me to the work of Rodrigo Toscano, Annell López, and Ariel Francisco—all Latino writers living and writing in Louisiana.
The literary community here is tight-knit, collaborative, and inclusive. You can write with Chris and many local authors during the free and open New Orleans Writing Marathon, which meets periodically at New Orleans bars and cafés in small groups to compose prose side by side.
Jazz and poetry on Frenchmen Street
Jazz is, after all, poetry, and no visit to New Orleans is complete with a stop at the Spotted Cat.
Photo by ezellhphotography/Shutterstock
“Improvisation and music are key to New Orleans literature,” author Maurice Carlos Ruffin told the audience at the Tennessee Williams Festival. Chris, over our po’boy lunch, encourages me to visit Frenchmen Street before I leave. Jazz is, after all, poetry.
At the Spotted Cat Music Club, the band playing is Shake ’Em Up, an all-female jazz ensemble. Under the blue lights, they cover the languid “Why” by Leon Redbone. Leaving Frenchmen Street, with music pouring from open doors and galleries, I remember to savor these lines from Black Beat poet Bob Kaufman’s poem “Believe, Believe”:
Believe in the swinging sounds of jazz,
Tearing the night into intricate shreds,
Putting it back together again.
