Overview

Much of the story of Hurricane Katrina lived on the internet as the city reconnected during its diaspora. When Cynthia Joyce went looking for one vital account for a course she was teaching, she found the site down and the piece forgotten. This inspired her search for the works that became Please Forward: How Blogging Reconnected New Orleans After Katrina. Some of the writing included is famous and easily obtainable; a good percentage of the work is currently unavailable due to aging servers and broken links. Taken together, these pieces are powerful testament to the New Orleans blogging community who proved the internet could function as a crucial platform in a time of crisis.

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9781608011087

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This is an essential document of the state of mind of New Orleanians before and during and after Katrina. It's raw, it's pained, it's outraged, it's heartbroken- all the things it should be.--Dave Eggers Cynthia Joyce exhumes the colloquial, hyper-literate voice of a population that is never so open as when its citizens are talking amongst themselves. In the process, she has brought to light the one thing outsiders could never comprehend, at least until now: the deep emotional scar Hurricane Katrina's levee breaches left on those who survived the disaster. --Brett Anderson, restaurants critic and features writer, NOLA.com These are postcards from a city that was on the very edge. They are selfies shot against a backdrop of unprecedented catastrophe. For survivors of Katrina, the collected blog posts will kick up raw memories, some cherished, some still harrowing. Readers lucky enough to have only wondered what disaster is like will find an answer. It's all here: the terror, the confusion, the compassion, the self-absorption, the posturing, the misinformation masquerading as insight -- above all the ties that held us together and made recovery possible. --Jed Horne, Author of Breach of Faith, Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City Most of us never got the real story of Hurricane Katrina. The real story lies in these heartbreaking pages: stories of good people who built happy lives for themselves, watching those lives get ripped apart by 15 feet of toxic flood water. Please Forward offers a riveting montage of devastated voices waiting to hear from lost family members, waiting to be treated with respect by the outsiders who invaded their city, and waiting to see if there was anything left to rebuild once the waters finally receded. --Heather Havrilesky, author of the memoir Disaster Preparedness A collection of blog posts bears witness to the horrific aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. As an assemblage of mostly short Internet writings from the two years after natural disaster and official mismanagement devastated New Orleans...the most powerful will move readers to outrage. --Kirkus Reviews

This is an essential document of the state of mind of New Orleanians before and during and after Katrina. It's raw, it's pained, it's outraged, it's heartbroken- all the things it should be.--Dave Eggers Cynthia Joyce exhumes the colloquial, hyper-literate voice of a population that is never so open as when its citizens are talking amongst themselves. In the process, she has brought to light the one thing outsiders could never comprehend, at least until now: the deep emotional scar Hurricane Katrina's levee breaches left on those who survived the disaster.--Brett Anderson, restaurants critic and features writer, NOLA.com These are postcards from a city that was on the very edge. They are selfies shot against a backdrop of unprecedented catastrophe. For survivors of Katrina, the collected blog posts will kick up raw memories, some cherished, some still harrowing. Readers lucky enough to have only wondered what disaster is like will find an answer. It's all here: the terror, the confusion, the compassion, the self-absorption, the posturing, the misinformation masquerading as insight -- above all the ties that held us together and made recovery possible.--Jed Horne, Author of Breach of Faith, Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City Most of us never got the real story of Hurricane Katrina. The real story lies in these heartbreaking pages: stories of good people who built happy lives for themselves, watching those lives get ripped apart by 15 feet of toxic flood water. Please Forward offers a riveting montage of devastated voices waiting to hear from lost family members, waiting to be treated with respect by the outsiders who invaded their city, and waiting to see if there was anything left to rebuild once the waters finally receded.--Heather Havrilesky, author of the memoir Disaster Preparedness A collection of blog posts bears witness to the horrific aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. As an assemblage of mostly short Internet writings from the two years after natural disaster and official mismanagement devastated New Orleans...the most powerful will move readers to outrage.--Kirkus Reviews

A collection of blog posts bears witness to the horrific aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. As an assemblage of mostly short Internet writings from the two years after natural disaster and official mismanagement devastated New Orleans...the most powerful will move readers to outrage. -- Kirkus Reviews Kirkus Reviews

This is an essential document of the state of mind of New Orleanians before and during and after Katrina. It's raw, it's pained, it's outraged, it's heartbroken- all the things it should be.--Dave Eggers Cynthia Joyce exhumes the colloquial, hyper-literate voice of a population that is never so open as when its citizens are talking amongst themselves. In the process, she has brought to light the one thing outsiders could never comprehend, at least until now: the deep emotional scar Hurricane Katrina's levee breaches left on those who survived the disaster. --Brett Anderson, restaurants critic and features writer, NOLA.com These are postcards from a city that was on the very edge. They are selfies shot against a backdrop of unprecedented catastrophe. For survivors of Katrina, the collected blog posts will kick up raw memories, some cherished, some still harrowing. Readers lucky enough to have only wondered what disaster is like will find an answer. It's all here: the terror, the confusion, the compassion, the self-absorption, the posturing, the misinformation masquerading as insight -- above all the ties that held us together and made recovery possible .--Jed Horne, Author of Breach of Faith, Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City Most of us never got the real story of Hurricane Katrina. The real story lies in these heartbreaking pages: stories of good people who built happy lives for themselves, watching those lives get ripped apart by 15 feet of toxic flood water. Please Forward offers a riveting montage of devastated voices waiting to hear from lost family members, waiting to be treated with respect by the outsiders who invaded their city, and waiting to see if there was anything left to rebuild once the waters finally receded. --Heather Havrilesky, author of the memoir Disaster Preparedness A collection of blog posts bears witness to the horrific aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. As an assemblage of mostly short Internet writings from the two years after natural disaster and official mismanagement devastated New Orleans...the most powerful will move readers to outrage. --Kirkus Reviews

Author Information

Cynthia Joyce has been a writer, editor, and web producer for more than 15 years and has contributed to several regional and national publications, including The Washington Post, Newsday, NPR.org, Entertainment Weekly, and MSNBC.com, where she was a senior producer from 2007-2011; Nola.com, where she worked briefly as a producer post-Katrina; and Salon, where she was arts and entertainment editor from 1995-2000. She received her BA from Duke University in 1991, and her Masters of Science in Journalism from Northwestern University in 1993. She joined the Ole Miss faculty in 2011. She lives in Oxford, Mississippi.

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