LAURA CAYOUETTE

Dedicated to Carnival, concerts, cuisine and culture of New Orleans, LAtoNOLA originally started as "One woman's journey from LaLaLand to the Big Easy." Though my family has been from Louisiana for hundreds of years, I didn't move to New Orleans until 2009. At first, I wrote about settling into a new city and a very old culture. I covered things like getting my car street legal and my first big storm.

Then the Saints made their way to the Super Bowl during Mardi Gras and I starting wanting the whole world to know what it felt like to be here for that moment (which later became the inspiration for my first Charlotte Reade Mystery). Over time, I went from observer and researcher to behind-the-scenes to a participant in the city's parades, concerts and culture. In 2013, I joined the Pussyfooters, a parade dance troupe of about 120 women over-30 wearing pink corsets and white combat boots and I've been dancing in the streets ever since.

People in over 100 countries have discovered LAtoNOLA as it's evolved into a unique resource capturing context, history, and insider-outsider translations of our traditions, cuisine and colloquialisms. Whether you're relocating here, planning a trip, or wondering if I caught a photo of your high school band on parade, I've tried to make the blog user-friendly with categories, tags, a search engine and pages including my favorite things and links to many of the restaurants, musicians, clubs, events, charities and cool things I've mentioned. You can even find local t-shirts, greeting cards and gifts I've designed and interviews I did with Richard Dreyfuss and Jeff "The Dude" Dowd.

New Orleans is my home and my heart. Though I still write about my industry and Los Angeles on occassion, LAtoNOLA has become a long love letter to this city and its Carnival, concerts, cuisine and culture.

LAtoNOLA