Biography

Larry Gray is professor emeritus at Southeastern Louisiana University and his passions are writing and theatre. He published a children’s book, The Land of the Three Elves, under the pseudonym Grandpa Gray and his short story collection, Bayou Coeur and Other Stories, was published by Clemson University Press in 2018. His plays have won many awards, including Mid-South Playwriting and Mazim Mazumdar prizes. After retiring, he was Artist in Residence in the Opera program at Southeastern for 14 years.

Schedule

11:30 am to 12:30 pm
House Committee Room 4
Fiction: Men Write About Social Issues, Exploration, Growth, and Loss
with Larry Gray, Philip Jason, Toby LeBlanc, Amos Jasper Wright IV, and moderator Chris Tusa

12:45 pm to 1:30 pm
Cavalier House Books Tent
Book Signing

The House on Esplanade 

Every year since November 11, 1918, in a house on New Orleans’s Esplanade Avenue, Yvonne St. Amant lights a candle for her husband, lost in the Great War. Then on this same day in 1933, a young woman brings a baby to Yvonne’s door before shortly disappearing. The baby, nicknamed Bing, grows into a thoughtful, precocious woman whose life intertwines with many of the biggest events of the twentieth century: World War II, an outbreak of polio that leaves her with an almost indiscernible limp, and the summer of love in San Francisco. Along the way, Bing explores abroad, finding romance and heartbreak in Paris, art in the Côte d’Azur, faith in Istanbul.

Returning always to the house on Esplanade, Bing has one ambition through it all, “I don’t want to grow old before I grow wise.” This is her story.