Ken Wells, journalist and novelist, grew up second of six sons on the banks of Bayou Black deep in South Louisiana's Cajun country. His father was a part-time alligator hunter and snake collector and his Cajun-French-speaking mother a gumbo chef extraordinaire.
Wells began his journalism career covering car wrecks and gator sightings for the weekly Houma, La., Courier newspaper. He has gone on to an adventurous career: a Pulitzer Prize finalist for the Miami Herald; editor of two Pulitzer-Prize-winning projects for Page One of The Wall Street Journal where, over a 24-year period, he also roamed the U.S. and the globe covering among other stories the Exxon Valdez oil spill, the first Persian Gulf War and South Africa's transition to a multiracial democracy. He later served as a senior editor for Conde Nast Portfolio magazine and spent six years at Bloomberg News/Businessweek as both a senior writer and editor before leaving in 2015 to pursue book writing full-time.
He is the author of six well-received novels of the Cajun bayous: Meely LaBauve (a 2000 Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers book); Junior's Leg (2001); Logan's Storm (2002); and Crawfish Mountain (2007). Tom Wolfe said of Crawfish Mountain, "Ken Wells is the Cajun Carl Hiaasen." In 2010, Knopf Young Adult published his YA novel, Rascal, a Dog and His Boy. His sixth novel, Swamped! is a fast-paced YA survival story set in Louisiana's exotic and forbidding Atchafalaya Swamp. It was co-authored with his niece Hillary Wells and published in January of 2023.
Wells has penned four works of narrative non-fiction: Travels with Barley: A Quest for the Perfect Beer Joint, a travelogue through America's $75 billion beer industry; The Good Pirates of the Forgotten Bayous, a story of blue-collar heroism in the wake of Hurricane Katrina; Gumbo Life: Tales from the Roux Bayou, published by W.W. Norton in 2019 and republished as a paperback by Blair Publisher in 2024; and Boudin, a lively travelogue through the mania surrounding Louisiana's most popular sausage, that was published by LSU Press on April 14 as part of its Louisiana True series. The Pirates, published in September 2008 by Yale University Press, won the Harry Chapin book award in September 2009. A paperback version was published by YUP in 2015. Gumbo Life, meanwhile, was chosen by the Louisiana Center for the Book to represent the state at the National Book Festival in Washington, D.C., last fall.
While serving as an editor on Page One of The Wall Street Journal, Ken was also chosen to edit two anthologies of "A-heds," the beloved middle-column feature that has appeared on the front page of the paper since the early 1940s. Floating Off the Page was published in 2003 and Herd on the Street: Animal Stories from The Wall Street Journal was published in 2007.
Ken more recently is the author the whimsical Christmas novella, A Christmas Tree Without a House: The Tale of Sam and the Mysterious Joseph E.W. Pine (A Very Possibly True Story) available on Amazon and which is now an audiobook on Audible. Kirkus Reviews called it "enchanting." Ken's journalistic and literary accomplishments were honored in 2009 when he was awarded an honorary doctorate from his undergraduate alma mater, Nicholls State University, and was inducted as a Louisiana Legend by Louisiana Public Broadcasting that same year.
Ken divides his time these days between Chicago and a lovely little summer log cabin in the wilds of Maine. He's an avid photographer, hiker and fisherman and dabbles in blues and jazz guitar and songwriting. He cooks a mean Cajun gumbo and visits Louisiana every chance he gets.