New Orleans Writers Museum Project Announced

Today the Louisiana Writers Foundation announced plans to create a museum honoring writers who have lived in New Orleans that will also provide services to support those presently living and writing in the city.

New Orleans, LA (PRWEB) August 28, 2008 -- The Louisiana Writers Foundation (LWF) has announced plans to create a museum honoring writers who have lived in New Orleans that will also provide services to support those presently living and writing in the city.

The announcement was originally scheduled three years ago this week, but Hurricane Katrina scuttled the effort. "New Orleans is and was a wonderful place for writers, and a place to honor their legacies," stated writer and NPR commentator, Andrei Codrescu. New Orleans has a rich literary tradition dating back more than two centuries. Writers such as Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams and William S. Burroughs have made New Orleans their home. Perhaps lesser known is that other famed writers have lived there including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Walt Whitman, Eugene O'Neill and Charles Bukowski.

The Five People You Meet in Hell: Surviving Katrina

"New Orleans has historically had a thriving literary community and the planned New Orleans Writers Museum will be a living, educational memorial for visitors and residents alike," stated Robert Smallwood, a writer and founder of LWF. Smallwood's book, "The Five People You Meet in Hell: Surviving Katrina," was the first eyewitness account published of the hurricane and its violent aftermath in downtown New Orleans in August, 2005.

"The past is illustrious, but writers continue to live and write here," Codrescu stated. "Such a museum would function ideally as both a place to educate people about our writing tradition, and a clearinghouse for writers who choose New Orleans for their literary habitat."

Several locations within the New Orleans French Quarter are being reviewed as a possible site for the New Orleans Writers Museum.

The Louisiana Writers Foundation is a nonprofit organization created to support the efforts of Louisiana writers and to preserve the literary heritage of the state hardest hit by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

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