Dear Readers,
We’re excited to announce our latest guide, focused on one of our favorite cities: New Orleans. We’ll be releasing stories from the volume throughout the coming weeks but to read all the great pieces, you’ll need to subscribe!
For tourists, New Orleans can feel like America’s best playground. Whether it’s Mardi Gras, JazzFest or just a long weekend in spring, it’s a city to visit, to let loose and to be entertained. But of course, such visits only represent one way to understand the city.
In this latest volume of Stranger’s Guide, come with us to encounter a different New Orleans, where fights over climate change, queer politics and racial justice unfold alongside music, tradition and joy. The more you love the Big Easy, the more meaningful it is to see this special place holistically—its cultural institutions, its longstanding Black history, its music, its poverty, its food. New Orleans has always occupied a unique place in American identity, a crossroads for some of the country’s best and worst qualities.
Join us in Stranger’s Guide: New Orleans to parade with some of NOLA’s most famous second line musicians and learn about the vanishing Black-owned bars that have long defined the city. Explore the Bourbon Street of old with the people that grew up there and discover the father of New Orleans baseball and the curse he left on the city. Hear Big Freedia reminisce about childhood and Maurice Carlos Ruffin search for the perfect coffee shop for novel writing. Experience Christmas at the Orleans Parish Prison, built without visiting rooms and see the shadow Hurricane Katrina continues to cast over the region.
From the moment we began to work on this guide, we knew it would be something special and something to celebrate. Then shortly before we went to press, we received even more exciting news. For the second straight year, we received the National Magazine Award for General Excellence, one of the most prestigious awards in journalism. For us, it was a recognition that our work—providing new, global perspectives from around the world—is critical.
Our ambitions continue to grow as we redefine travel writing, challenge stereotypes and foster global citizenship. Consider supporting this important and necessary work and subscribe today to get your copy of New Orleans.
Thank you, as always, for joining us on this journey,
Kira Brunner Don and Abby Rapoport
Co-founders, Stranger’s Guide
Contributor
Kira Brunner Don is the Editor-in-Chief and co-founder of Stranger’s Guide. She worked as a magazine editor in New York for seventeen years and as a journalist in Eastern Europe and the Balkans. She studied philosophy at The New School’s Graduate Faculty and worked at a think tank at Columbia University before joining Lapham’s Quarterly, where she was Executive Editor for eight years. She has received two National Magazine Awards for General Excellence in her role as Editor-in-Chief of Stranger’s Guide and one National Magazine Award in Photography for her photo curation. In 2022 she was named the FOLIO: Eddie and Ozzie Award’s Editor of the Year. She is co-editor of the book The New Killing Fields: Massacre and the Politics of Intervention and was the co-founder of the Oakland Book Festival. She lives in Oakland, California with her two children.
Abby Rapoport is the publisher and co-founder of Stranger's Guide. Abby spent the first portion of her career as a political reporter, covering Texas politics for the Texas Tribune, the Texas Observer and then The American Prospect. Her work has also appeared in Glamour, The National Journal and The New Republic. Prior to founding Stranger's Guide, she served as Acting Publisher for the Texas Observer and currently chairs the Texas Democracy Foundation.
