New Orleans, 20 Years After the Deluge

Honoring the Big Easy and a look back at one of the most meaningful projects in my life as writer, journalist, and story seeker

The cover of Josh Neufeld’s graphic novel A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge, which recounts Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath through the stories of seven people. The work was first serialized in SMITH Magazine.

New Orleans and the devastation of Hurricane Katrina is on many of our minds with the arrival of its 20th anniversary. Among the moving stories that have crossed my path is an NPR segment called “Nigel and the Hurricane.”

NPR’s Michel Martin speaks with New Orleans’ local public radio station reporter Alana Schreiber about the impact of a young evacuee named Nigel Tapp. Twenty years ago, Nigel and others from his school in New Orleans enrolled in a pre-K class at her school in Montclair, New Jersey (she was in third grade). After Nigel went back home, his classmates and teachers created and sold a book they made themselves called Nigel and the Hurricane to raise funds when they learned he’d lost his home. Years later — now 28 living in New Orleans — Schreiber orchestrates an emotional Zoom reunion between Nigel and his former teacher and classmates, reminding us how simple gestures rooted in personal connections can become enduring stories. At its heart, this four-minute audio story is about building human connection and memory.

Back in 2006, Josh Neufeld and I went to New Orleans to talk to people about their experience escaping and surviving Katrina for a graphic novel Josh would write and illustrate. We weren’t exactly sure what we would find. Twenty years after Katrina — and seventeen after the publication of A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge — I think we, too, found a story of memory, connection, and resilience.

A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge was one of the first projects of SMITH Magazine (one of the first online magazines and the original home of Six-Word Memoirs), and it remains one of the most meaningful projects I’ve been a part of in my many years helping stories of everyday people come to light. A.D. is an account of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath told through the real experiences of seven New Orleanians. It’s based almost entirely on first-person reporting by Josh and myself, with Josh doing the heavy lifting — blending journalism with the intimacy of comics and the singular craft he brings to the form.

It was a profound experience, one in which we soon found ourselves breaking journalistic “rules" as we got pretty close to many of the people in the story. At the time, we decided this was okay because the project wasn’t an exposé; it was an attempt to honor their stories, to relate their lived experiences into the comics’ images (and words). And the proof was in the pudding: the characters appeared in all sorts of media and many became our lifelong friends. As Josh recalls, “They felt that those really were their experiences in the comic. As New Orleanians who had lived through so much neglect, they finally felt heard.”

That A.D. became a New York Times bestseller and was named one of the top 10 books of the year by Vanity Fair, Salon, MTV, The Daily Beast, and Mother Jones was certainly exciting. That A.D. has been taught in schools in New Orleans and beyond (with Neufeld presenting his work to the incoming freshmen at LSU’s Honors College in early September!) means much more.

Below are just a few of the heartbreaking and heartfelt images from the book (click any image to see it in full).