Wendy A. Gaudin is a historian and writer whose interdisciplinary work centers southern-descended, mixed-heritage, and mixed-race populations and histories. As a mixed-heritage Louisiana Creole of Color whose elders migrated to California in the first half of the twentieth century, Gaudin is deeply moved, shaped, and inspired by her expansive community’s story. She divides her time between New Orleans and Acadiana, and she teaches history at Xavier University of Louisiana.

At Xavier, Gaudin teaches courses in the core as well as in the disciplines of History and African American and Diaspora Studies. Her research interests are primarily in Creole history and the histories of racially mixed people in different French colonial contexts, namely South Louisiana and South Vietnam, where she has conducted oral history research. Gaudin’s creative nonfiction and autoethnographic essays have been published in Indiana Review, New Orleans Review, North American Review, Rappahannock Review, and About Place Journal. She has contributed chapters to The Beiging of America: Personal Narratives about Being Mixed Race in the Twentieth Century and Of Color: Poets’ Ways of Making. Her book, Diasporic Creole: A Chronicle of New Orleans and Beyond, is forthcoming (LSU Press).

Katy Morlas Shannon has dedicated her career as a professional historian to uncovering the stories of enslaved people. She was instrumental in the early stages of research for Whitney Plantation, created a searchable online database of over 400 enslaved individuals at Evergreen Plantation, and cocurated an exhibit about the enslaved community at Laura Plantation.

Her book, Antoine of Oak Alley: The Unlikely Origin of Pecans and the Enslaved Gardener Who Cultivated Them, was published in November 2021 by Pelican Press and received the Phillis Wheatley Award for the best biography of 2022 from the Sons and Daughters of the Middle Passage.

Morlas Shannon was the historian who uncovered the identity and story of an enslaved child in the painting Bélizaire and the Frey Children, circa 1837, attributed to Jacques Amans. Bélizaire’s story and historian Katy Morlas Shannon were featured in the New York Times mini-documentary that first released in August 2023. The story also appeared on the front page of the New York Times on August 14, 2023.

Shannon received her master’s degree in History from Louisiana State University in 2005.