Mary Helen Lagasse is a native New Orleanian. She was educated in the parochial schools of the city, received her BA from Tulane University in 1978, and "between writing" is working toward an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of New Orleans. Mary Helen is bilingual, American by birth, Latina by heritage, and feels that she has had the best of both worlds in her upbringing.
While earning her degree at Tulane, she concurrently attended evening classes, worked as a teller and safety deposit vault clerk at a local bank, and taught English and Spanish at private schools in Metairie, a suburb of New Orleans. She won first place in a statewide contest for her short story, "Survival of the Species," published in the 1987 edition of Ellipses, the literary magazine of UNO.
Throughout this time, Mary Helen worked as a freelance writer. Her stories have appeared in all major publications in and around the New Orleans metropolitan community--The Vieux Carre Courier, the New Orleans Times Picayune, Dixie Roto Magazine, The Clarion Herald, Gambit, and New Orleans Magazine. Her articles ran the gamut of political, social, cultural, and "human interest" issues--in-depth interviews with governors, senators, movers and shakers of industry--specifically oilmen in the boon days--slumlords, artists and craftsmen; Black Muslims, lifers doing time at Angola Prison, writers (one, Shirley Ann Grau, Pulitzer Prize winning author of The House on Coliseum Street), old New Orleans neighborhoods, hot air balloons and WWII bi-planes in which she flew. Her series of articles on the abominably perilous conditions of Audubon Park Zoo and the plight of the animals garnered public and federal governmental attention and reform. The wide diversity of topics fired her imagination and enhanced her wealth of knowledge and experience that she has expressed in her craft.
In the last couple of years, she has given up all professional occupations to devote herself entirely to her writing. She has completed two novels, A Hungry Heart and The Fifth Sun, which was awarded the 2003 Miguel Mármol Prize, the 2004 Premio Atzlán Award, the 2005 Independent Publishers Award for Multicultural Fiction, and it was also a finalist for Book of the Year 2004, awarded by Foreword Magazine. She also has a work-in-progress based on the construction of the 1830's construction of New Basin Canal in New Orleans where hundreds of Irish emigrants worked and died under harrowing conditions. The working title of this manuscript is Bridget Fury. She is also at work on a manuscript dealing with the dynamics of family life: the revelations and the corrosive affects following the death of the paterfamilias.
Mary Helen has been an active participant in Words & Music Literary Conference held in New Orleans, and until recently was an Executive Board member of The Faulkner Society, sponsor of the W&M conference. She is well acquainted with the literary community in New Orleans, among them, Purlitzer Prize winner Shirley Ann Grau who blurbed Mary Helen's novel. She is an avid supporter of a number of animal rights organizations.
Mary Helen Lagasse is married, has two grown sons, and lives with her husband, Will and Moochie, her pet cocker spaniel, in Metairie--a stone's throw from the heart of New Orleans.
Works by Mary Helen
Lagasse
from Curbstone Press:
