Our guest this week on Pathways is Randy Fertel, author of The Gorilla Man and the Empress of Steak: A New Orleans Family Memoir. Randy is a writer based in New York and New Orleans, and is president of both the Fertel Foundation and the Ruth U. Fertel Foundation. He holds a PhD from Harvard University, where he received a student-voted teaching award, and specializes in the literature of the Vietnam War. He has taught English at Harvard, Tulane University, LeMoyne College, the New School for Social Research, and the University of New Orleans. Fertel is a prolific and popular essayist with recent items in Smithsonian, Gastronomica, Gilt Taste, Creative Nonfiction, Tikkun, New Orleans Magazine and Kenyon Review, which published his award-winning essay on Hurricane Katrina.