Writer and musician Michael Patrick Welch has covered New Orleans and its music for almost two decades, in local publications like Gambit Weekly and OffBeat, as well as national outlets like The Guardian, Vox, McSweeney’s, Columbia Journalism Review, Oxford American, and Vice. He lives with his partner, two daughters, and seven goats in William Burroughs’s old neighborhood of Algiers and, since Katrina, has taught a rap class in New Orleans schools.