There's an update on the New Orleans-based Neighborhood Story Project Elizabeth mentioned earlier this week. Well, okay, it isn't really much of an update--the Project and its Brooklyn ally, Soft Skull Press, are still looking for funds--but it's on MSNBC now.

And, actually, this new article makes the very interesting point that New Orleans, one of the most important cities in African-American culture, is somewhat lacking in black literary icons: "There are no author equivalents to Louis Armstrong, Fats Domino or the city's many other musical greats." That's not strictly true--Alice Dunbar-Nelson was the first African-American to publish a short story collection, 1899's The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories, and Armand Lanusse edited the first anthology of African-American poetry in 1845--but I know what the reporter meant. If you have to turn to Google to find an African-American writer from New Orleans, he or she is probably not that well-known, unjust as that may be. Either that or I'm not as culturally literate as I thought, but let's not go there.

(On the contemporary literary scene, Yusef Komunyakaa was born in nearby Bogalusa and spent a lot of time in the city in the 1980s.)