About the Author...
Text Box: 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.
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             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. Besides Crawfish Mountain, Wells is also the author of three previously well-received novels of the Cajun bayous, Meely LaBauve, Junior’s Leg and Logan’s Storm, collectively known as the Catahoula Bayou Trilogy. He also recently completed his second non-fiction narrative called, The Good Pirates of the Forgotten Bayous: Fighting to Save a Way of Life in the Wake of Hurricane It will be published by Yale University Press in August of 2008. 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.) He works in Manhattan and lives under some very large oak trees on the far outskirts of town. In his spare time, he drinks beer, fishes when he can, dabbles in blues and jazz guitar and songwriting and is hard at work on his next novel.

 

 

 

 
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Ken with a Louisiana redfish caught and released in October ‘07 in the bayous below Montegut, La.

 Photo by Bob Wells

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