T. R. Johnson is a Professor of English and Weiss Presidential Fellow at Tulane University. He is the editor of New Orleans: A Literary History and the author of New Orleans: a Writer's City. Since 1999, he has lived in the 9th Ward of New Orleans near the Mississippi River. Matthew Paul Smith is an instructor in the English Department at Tulane University. He is the author of 'The Civil War's Literary Aftershocks' in New Orleans: A Literary History and has published on narrative, aesthetics, and plantation tourism in Southern Quarterly, where he now serves on the editorial board.