Ken Wells grew up on a little farm on the banks of Bayou Black outside of Houma, La., second of six sons to an alligator-hunting father and a Cajun-French-speaking mother who cooked her gumbo with a roux. He got into journalism by covering car wrecks and gator sightings for his hometown weekly newspaper and went on to a five-decade career that included a stop at the Miami Herald, 24 years as an editor and feature writer for The Wall Street Journal and six more at Bloomberg/Businessweek. He’s a Pulitzer-Prize finalist and the author of six novels of the Louisiana bayous, most recently Swamped!, a young-adult survival tale set in Louisiana’s Atchafalaya Basin, and the Cajun coming-of-age classic, Meely LaBauve.

Gumbo Life: A Journey Down the Roux Bayou is his third book of narrative non-fiction. His 2008 post-Katrina narrative, The Good Pirates of the Forgotten Bayous, won the Harry Chapin Book Award. Ken divides his time between an apartment in Chicago and a little log cabin in the wilds of Maine.