J. Michael Warner is a writer and blogger who grew up in New Orleans and lives in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, not far from his home town. He writes history and culture columns for The French Quarter Journal.

He edited A Lyle Saxon Reader: Lost Stories of the French Quarter and Buried Treasure, second-place winner of the 2019 IndieReader Discovery Award for Fiction. First published 1919-1923 in the New Orleans Times-Picayune newspaper, the thirty-nine tales that comprise A Lyle Saxon Reader include short stories, preservationist essays and character sketches of the author’s beloved city.

Michael’s writing’s work-in-progress, is a biography entitled Palette and Pen: Charles Whitfield Richards and His Circle. The manuscript for Palette and Pen won distinction as Finalist in the 2018 Faulkner-Wisdom Awards for Nonfiction Book.

Charles Richards (1906-1992) was a journalist and visual artist whose career spanned most of the 20th century, from Jazz Age Paris to modern New Orleans. Richards was at the center of the New Orleans art community from the 1940s to the 1990s, and was the illustrator for Jeanne deLavigne’s memorable book, Ghost Stories of Old New Orleans.