Please join us for a special evening celebrating the release of BEFORE DURING AFTER: Louisiana Photographers’ Visual Reactions to Hurricane Katrina.  This book is a through-the-lens visual and literary exploration of how Hurricane Katrina has transformed the lives and work of twelve photographers.

Five years in the wake of the storm, we discover Katrina’s imprint on the creative expression of each artist. Adding depth to the pictorial representation, each photographer has written an intimate account of how Katrina changed his or her life, work and vision of the future. The photographers include:

Eric Julian

Elizabeth Kleinveld

Rowan Metzner

David Rae Morris

Tom Neff

Sam Portera

Frank Relle

Jen Shaw

Mark Sindler

Zack Smith

Jonathan Trraviesa

There will be a presentation and book signing featuring John Biguenet, who wrote the Foreword and Afterword, Editor and Photographer Elizabeth Kleinveld (who conceived the book), Creative Director Tom Varisco and many of the contributing photographers.

We saw it.

We captured it.

We are forever changed by it.

Please join us for presentation and book signing with Louisiana coastal researcher Donald W. Davis featuring his just released book, WASHED AWAY?, the first comprehensive look at the settlement, occupation and environmental challenges of these Louisiana coastal communities.

Donald W. Davis has been involved in Louisiana coastal research for more than forty years as a professor at Nicholls State University and more recently LSU.  He has always emphasized the importance of humankind in landscape evolution and change. Davis is currently administering a Louisiana Sea Grant project to develop an extensive oral history of the Louisiana Wetlands.

Outstanding…. Anna’s complex personality continues to elevate the series, and the ranger’s sojourn to New Orleans further energizes this always reliable series. --Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Barr develops the narrative carefully, never letting the eerie black-magic elements overshadow her solid and suspenseful plotting. A definite winner. --Booklist

New York Times best-selling New Orleans-based author Nevada Barr returns to Octavia Books for a reading performance and booksigning featuring her explosive new Anna Pigeon novel. BURN finds the resilient National Park Service ranger leaving the country’s wide open spaces to face danger in the back streets of New Orleans.

Recovering from her last adventure, Anna arrives in the Big Easy to stay with a friend and soon runs into trouble; the friend has a suspicious tenant who leaves a gruesome hint that Anna is the target of a hex. Searching for some answers in the markets of self-proclaimed witches, Anna uncovers hints of a criminal ring far more sinister than any voodoo curse.

In far away Seattle, a woman named Clare faces a nightmarish situation of her own. Narrowly escaping a house fire, she watches in horror as firemen pull what appear to be the bodies of her children from the wreckage. But moments before the fire, her house had been empty. Finding herself under suspicion for starting the blaze, she flees the Northwest in disguise, desperate to discover what has happened to her family.

Clare’s search intertwines with Anna’s own confrontation, and both find themselves heading into a terrifying underworld of cruelty and exploitation. BURN is a powerful novel of caring, determined people refusing to bend in the face of utter viciousness.

Nevada Barr writes with a cool steady hand about the violence of nature and the cruelty of man.

-New York Times