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About the Author... |
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Ken with a Louisiana redfish caught and released in the bayous below Montegut, La. |
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Photo by Bob Wells |
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Ken Wells, a career journalist and part-time novelist, grew up in a beer-drinking family on the banks of Bayou Black deep in Louisiana’s Cajun Delta. Second of six sons, he began his writing career as a 19-year-old college dropout covering car wrecks and gator sightings for the Houma, Louisiana, Courier. He has an English degree from Nicholls State University in Thibodaux, La., and left the bayous in 1975 for the University of Missouri School of Journalism, where he earned a master’s degree and went on to a feature-writing job at the Miami Herald. In 1982, his final year at the Herald, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for a series on how a vast flood-control system built for powerful agribusiness interests was helping to decimate the Florida Everglades. Wells joined The Wall Street Journal that same year and served stints in its San Francisco and London bureaus before moving to New York in 1993 as a features editor for Page One. He’s covered stories as disparate as polygamy in Utah, the Exxon Valdez oil spill, South Africa’s transition to a multi-racial democracy and the first Persian Gulf War. During his Page One tenure, he supervised a small team of reporters who wrote exclusively for the front page on issues such as race, immigration and the environment. Two of his reporters went on to win Pulitzer Prizes, including the 1999 prize for feature writing. Ken took a year’s sabbatical in 2002-2003 to research and write his first non-fiction narrative, Travels with Barley, a travelogue through the nation’s $75 billion beer industry. He is also the author of four well-received Random House novels of the Cajun bayous: Crawfish Mountain published in 2008, and Meely LaBauve, Junior’s Leg and Logan’s Storm, collectively known as the Catahoula Bayou Trilogy published between 2000 and 2003. His second non-fiction narrative, The Good Pirates of the Forgotten Bayous: Fighting to Save a Way of Life in the Wake of Hurricane, was published by Yale University Press in August of 2008. A story that grew out of Ken’s reportage on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina for The Wall Street Journal, it won the Harry Chapin Book Award in September 2009. Ken is also the editor of two anthologies from Free/Press/Wall Street Journal Books: Floating Off the Page: the Best Stories from The Wall Street Journal’s ‘Middle Column’ and Herd on the Street: Animal Stories from The Wall Street Journal. Ken left the Journal in October 2006 after 24 years to take a job as a senior editor for Conde’Nast Portfolio magazine. (Conde’ Nast publishes the New Yorker, Vanity Fair and numerous other titles.) Portfolio, alas, was a victim of the Great Recession and closed its doors after only two years of publication. Ken now works as a senior writer for Bloomberg News on its projects and investigations team doing long-form narrative journalism. He lives on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Ken’s fifth novel, Rascal, a Dog and His Boy, was published by Knopf-Random House Young Adult in the fall of 2010. Meanwhile, he is working on a memoir about growing up on the banks of Bayou Black and is in the middle of his sixth novel. In his spare time, Ken continues his quest to find the perfect beer joint. He dabbles in blues and jazz guitar and songwriting, collaborating with his brother Pershing Wells, owner of Digital Sac-a-Lait Productions of Houma, La., on contemporary interpretations of Cajun/Zydeco and South Louisiana R&B. A recent song, Cher BeBe’, was picked up by Cajun fiddler Waylon Thibodeaux and is the title cut of his latest CD. In between all these pursuits, Ken often wishes he were fishing. |