Roy Blount, Jr. is the author of over twenty books, about everything from the first woman president of the United States to what barnyard animals are thinking.  His most recent book is Save Room For Pie: Food Songs and Chewy Ruminations, and his other books include, Alphabetter Juice: The Joy of Text, Hail, Hail Euphoria: Presenting the Marx Brothers in Duck Soup, Long Time Leaving: Dispatches From Up South, which won the 2007 nonfiction award from the New England Independent Booksellers Association, and Feet on the Street: Rambles Around New Orleans, which The New York Times called “a wild, unpredictable ramble through a wild, unpredictable town.”

Blount is a panelist on NPR’s Wait, Wait…Don’t Tell Me, ex-president of the Authors Guild, a member of PEN and the Fellowship of Southern Authors, a New York Public Library Literary Lion, a Boston Public Library Literary Light, a usage consultant to the American Heritage Dictionary, and an original member of the Rock Bottom Remainders. He comes from Decatur, Georgia and divides his time between western Massachusetts and New Orleans. In 2009, he received the Thomas Wolfe Award from the University of North Carolina.

A contributing writer of The Oxford American, Blount writes a regular column for Garden and Gun, and has done so in the past for Esquire, The New York Times, Atlanta Magazine, Men’s Journal, Conde Nast Traveller, The San Francisco Examiner, and many more outlets. His essays, articles, stories, verses, and even drawings have appeared in 171 different periodicals including The New Yorker, Gourmet, Playboy, Vanity Fair, GQ, Life, TV Guide, Vogue, Rolling Stone, and National Geographic; and in 216 books, including The Best of Modern Humor, The Oxford Book of American Light Verse, The Norton Book of Light Verse, The Ultimate Baseball Book, Russell Baker’s Book of American Humor, and Best American Essays 1997.

For Sports Illustrated, where he was a staff writer and associate editor 1968-75 and is now a Senior Special Contributor, Blount has rafted the Amazon (attacked by piranha), played baseball with the 1969 Chicago Cubs (hit a ball 350 feet), become all but athletically a virtual member of the dynasty-years Pittsburgh Steelers, and hung out with Wilt Chamberlain, Yogi Berra, Reggie Jackson and the world’s oldest then-living lifeguard. (Though not all at once.)

Roy Blount, Jr. covered the 1992 Democratic and Republican conventions and Presidential election night by commenting, live and instantaneously, from a Barcalounger, on Comedy Central. Via various media he has reported on the Civil Rights Movement, the Ku Klux Klan, Saturday Night Live in its prime, Elvis’ funeral, an Olympics and several World Series and Super Bowls, and interviewed Martin Luther King, Willie Nelson, Ray Charles, Satchell Paige, Joe Dimaggio, Willie Mays, Loretta Lynn, Eudora Welty, Billy Carter, Gilda Radner, Casey Stengel, Jonathan Demme, Rep. Dick Armey, Cool Papa Bell, and Sally Rand.