I love New Orleans. I fell in love with the city as a little girl, just by reading stories set there. I watched in agony as Hurricane Katrina approached, prayed with friends that the city would be spared and wept when the levees broke and destroyed so many lives. I was given the opportunity to research and fact-check the city online post-Katrina, followed by two amazing, transcendent trips to NOLA in 2006 and 2007 for the Voodoo Music Fest and then Mardi Gras. I cheered when the Super Bowl was held there with U2 playing at halftime and whooped with ecstatic joy embracing a group of Orleans-loving friends when the Saints won last season. New Orleans is at once languorous and vital, seductive, dangerous, joyous, profound, sacred, nasty, naughty, glorious. She is the Holy of Holies, full of magic and mystery, charm and force; fierce and exuberant.

Unless you’ve spent some time down here on the Gulf Coast, you’re unlikely to really understand the people that live down here. Hard scrabble is a way of life. Historically, we’ve had systemic attacks on our people, our culture and our environment. The hostility runs pretty deep down here because the history of maltreatment runs pretty deep. There are several historical events that you really need to understand to understand the people of Southeastern Louisiana and the surrounding areas