Laura Brown is the Australian-born journalist and was the former editor of InStyle magazine.

Emeril Lagasse is the chef/proprietor of 7 restaurants in New Orleans, Las Vegas, as well as three restaurants at sea with Carnival Cruise Lines.

Dr.

Wally Lamb is the award-winning author of seven New York Times bestselling novels: She’s Come Undone, I Know This Much is True, The Hour I First Believed, Wishin’ & Hopin’, We Are Water, I’ll Take You There, and, most recently, The River is Waiting

C. Morgan Babst is a native of New Orleans. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in The Washington Post, Saveur, The Oxford American, Guernica, the Harvard Review, and the New Orleans Review, among others, and she is a regular contributor to Garden and Gun.

Andrea St. Paul Bland is the President of the Board of the Garden District Association and Chairman of the Profiles in Preservation Committee that created and managed the project through which this book was created. 

Hailing from the 7th Ward neighborhood of New Orleans, Julian “Juice” Gosin is an artist, producer, trumpeter, MC, and educator.

Sally Reeves is the retired longtime Archivist of the New Orleans Notarial Archives Division of the Office of the Clerk of Civil District Court. She is a noted local author, lecturer, translator, and architectural historian.

Peter Brannen is an award-winning science journalist whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, among other publications. His book, The Story of CO2 is the Story of Everything, was published August 26, 2025 by Ecco.

Ann Yoachim is the director of the Albert and Tina Small Center for Collaborative Design and a professor of practice at the Tulane School of Architecture. In her role as director, she leads the center’s programs and projects, drives strategic initiatives, and cultivates key partnerships to advance its mission.