Mark LaFlaur

Mark LaFlaur grew up in the South, mostly in Louisiana. He earned an MFA degree at Louisiana State University, where he worked on the literary magazine Exquisite Corpse. The author of Elysian Fields, a novel of New Orleans, he has also written for The American Scholar, The New Criterion, Los Angeles Times Book Review, and The Village Voice. He has worked in book publishing in New York, San Francisco, and in New Orleans, where he wrote Elysian Fields. After Hurricane Katrina in 2005 he founded Levees Not War, a New York–based, New Orleans–dedicated blog focusing on infrastructure and the environment, which led to his second book, What Fresh Hell? The Best of Levees Not War: Blogging on Post-Katrina New Orleans and America, 2005–2015. He is a senior production editor for a major book publisher and lives with his wife, Janet, in New York City.