Tom Piazza is the author of eleven books of fiction and nonfiction. No less a literary critic than Bob Dylan has said, “Tom Piazza's writing pulsates with nervous electrical tension – reveals the emotions that we can't define.” His work crosses genres and ignores categories, encompassing books as different as the novel City Of Refuge, which won the Willie Morris Award for Southern Fiction, the post-Katrina manifesto Why New Orleans Matters, and Devil Sent The Rain: Music and Writing in Desperate America, a collection of his essays and journalism. He was a principal writer for the innovative HBO drama series TREME, and the winner of a James Michener Award for his short-story collection Blues and Trouble. His most recent music-related book is The Southern Journey of Alan Lomax, produced by the Library of Congress and published by Norton. A three-time winner of the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for Music Writing, he is also a Grammy Award winner, for his album notes to Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues: A Musical Journey. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Bookforum, The Oxford American, Columbia Journalism Review, and many other periodicals. His novel A Free State will be published in 2015 by HarperCollins. He lives in New Orleans.