Roy Blount, Jr. is the author of 21 books, including Alphabet Juice; Feet on the Street: Rambles Around New Orleans; Roy Blount’s Book of Southern Humor; Robert E. Lee; Be Sweet: A Conditional Love Story; and Long Time Leaving: Dispatches From Up South, which collects his columns from The Oxford American. His work has appeared in over a hundred periodicals, including The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, Antaeus, The New York Times, The Southern Review, Gourmet and Sports Illustrated. A Vanderbilt graduate reared in Decatur, Georgia, Blount earned a master’s in English at Harvard and now lives in western Massachusetts.