Voices Rising: Stories from the Katrina Narrative Project
Description
On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina battered the Gulf Coast and nearly toppled the historic city of New Orleans. As the storm cleared, residents watched water and chaos overtake their city while political and legal systems proved unprepared and insufficient. The University of New Orleans served as a base for rescue and sustained tremendous damage to its Lakefront campus, but, in October 2005, the university reopened online and asked students to submit interviews and accounts of citizens’ experiences during Hurricane Katrina. Hundreds of manuscripts, interviews, and transcripts were collected from students and other residents who were willing to share their personal stories of the disaster. UNO compiled all of the submissions and created The Katrina Narrative Project, which is currently housed at the University of New Orleans Library. Voices Rising is a sampling of this greater collection. Transcending the images and headlines portrayed in the media, these are the true accounts of trauma and survival told by the people who endured them.
Reviews
“Many books have been written about the tragedy, but the work done by University of New Orleans students to collect these survivors’ narratives in 2005 is groundbreaking…Cutting, caustic, and riveting from start to finish, this collection does not shy away from presenting the agonies that often go unrecorded in the aftermath of a sudden disaster. Miles away from academic analysis, this is American social history from the ground up and staggering in its significance."
—Colleen Mondor, Booklist
Author Bio
Rebeca Antoine was born in Connecticut and is a graduate of Yale University and the Creative Writing Workshop at the University of New Orleans. Her fiction has appeared in numerous venues, most recently in The Briar Cliff Review and GulfStream.
