Donna Allen, Owner Cindy Dike, Children's Event Planner and Book Buyer, Maple Street New Gladin Scott, Manager, Event Planner, and Book Buyer, Maple Street New Matt Carney, Manager, Bayou Saint John (BSJ) Veronica Brooks-Sigler, Social Medium & Manager, Used and Rare Maureen Iverson, Bookseller (& Assistant Book Buyer!) Ben Jenkins, Manager, Maple Street at the Healing Center Beth Fox, Bookseller Ken Foster, Bookseller Sara White, Bookseller Sarah Sky, Bookseller Michael Glaviano, Bookseller

Stop at the shelf to the right of the checkout counter (near a huge window) at the new shop to see our staff picks. Check out the favs shelves of Donna, Jan, Gladin, Cindy, Veronica and Maureen. (We have favs shelves at the used store, too!) Please ask us about these books and others. We live to recommend.

Donna Allen, Owner back to top

Donna purchased Maple Street Book Shop from longtime owner, Rhoda Faust, in the Spring of 2007. Prior to this, she taught history at several local universities, including Loyola. When she’s not at the book shop, she can be found either renovating her home or gallivanting somewhere along the Mediterranean. Some of her favorite authors include Michael Grant, Tony Perrottet, John Steinbeck, Robert Graves, and Beppe Severgnini. Although she primarily reads non-fiction, her favorite book of all-time is John Kennedy Toole’s Confederacy of Dunces. Miss Donna recently finished The Solitude of Prime Numbers.

E-mail Donna.

Cindy Dike, Children's Event Planner and Book Buyer, Maple Street New back to top

Cindy has been a bookseller since 1986. She was a partner at Maple Street Children’s Book Shop from 1988 till she closed the doors of the shop in 2009. She is the children’s and young adult buyer (and event planner!) at Maple Street’s main branch.

In high school and in college, she enjoyed the required reading (with the exception of The Red Badge of Courage and The Scarlet Letter). She likes novels, murder mysteries and autobiographies. Her all time fav novel is To Kill a Mockingbird. Jane Austin, Charlotte Bronte, Charles Dickens, and John Stinebeck are all old friends whom she likes to visit every now and then. Jane Smiley, Kate Atkins, Tim Gautreaux, Richard Russo, Amy Tan, Annie Proulx are some of the contemporary authors on her favorites shelf at the book shop. On the subject of murder, Michael Connelly, P. D. James, Robert Goddard, and Janet Evanovich are her go-to authors. The bios she has read recently are Dead End Gene Pool by Wendy Burden and The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls .

She is now reading Three Quarters Dead by Richard Peck and on CD she is listening to Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel.

E-mail Cindy.

Gladin Scott, Manager, Event Planner, and Book Buyer, Maple Street New back to top

A long time customer of Maple Street Book Shop, Gladin joined the staff after a career in music and video distribution. Favorite writers include Pat Barker, Paul Bowles, E.M. Forster, Alan Hollingsworth, Ian McKuen, Iris Murdoch, Richard Russo, Paul Scott, Anne Tyler, and Evelyn Waugh. When he is not in the shop over-ordering the work of aging, obscure, or deceased British novelists, Gladin can frequently be found wandering Maple Street in search of coffee and other refreshments for the staff. Mr. Gladin includes these books among his memorable recent reads, John Irvings’s epic Last Night In Twisted River, psychiatrist Daniel Siegel’s Mindsight, and Donald Harrington’s heroic coming of age novel, With.

E-mail Gladin.

Matt Carney, Manager, Bayou Saint John (BSJ) back to top

Matt grew up in Baton Rouge then lived in New Orleans until he didn*t anymore and stayed away until he did again. He is relatively omnivorous when it comes to reading, though tends to grant concessions to certain genres over others. A few of his favorite authors include Philip K Dick, William Gibson, Michael Chabon, and J.M. Coetzee.

Mr. Matthew’s newest venture is something about covers.

E-mail Matt.

Veronica Brooks-Sigler, Social Medium & Manager, Used and Rare back to top

Miss Veronica is a Yankee transplant, who is trying hard not to sound like a dolt as she pronounces New Orleans street names. Even her husband Jeff’s family is not sure about her accent. Graduating from Cornell and then acquiring an MAT at Quinnipiac in Connecticut, she has spent the bulk of her working life as a teacher. She is now focusing her teaching on her newborn son, Kellen. Her passion for books and the store, which has embraced her cat-loving soul, led her to bring in the noise and the funk with various and sundry social media; already Maple was utilizing Facebook and Twitter, and Miss Veronica added a blog, an e-mail news service, and livestreaming to the store’s repertoire.

She reads everything and anything. At the moment she is reading The Patron Saint of Liars.. Some of her favorite books include Everything Matters, Sharp Objects, The Dante Club, Ender’s Game, and Last Days of Summer.

Miss Veronica is a writer. She wrote a book called Five Finger Fiction and is waiting to hear about the status of a children’s picture book.

E-mail Veronica.

Maureen Iverson, Bookseller (& Assistant Book Buyer!) back to top

Maureen has been a resident of New Orleans and a customer of the Maple Street Book Shops since 1995, age nine. A recent graduate of Tulane University, she has a B.A. in Studio Art with a concentration in Printmaking, and a B.S. in Psychology. Her favorite authors are Donald Barthelme, Ellen Gilchrist, Roald Dahl, and Flannery O’Connor. Her favorite books include The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides and A Birthday for Frances by Russell & Lillian Hoban. When she is not at the bookshop, she DJs at WTUL (Tuesdays, 11-2pm) and monitors open shop nights at the NOLA Community Printshop. Short stories are her favorite and she always starts mysteries at the end.

E-mail Maureen.

Ben Jenkins, Manager, Maple Street at the Healing Center back to top

Ben actually thinks it’s the heat and not the stupidity.

He is happy to be back in New Orleans after his latest stint in Baton Rouge where he partook in more schooling. When he is not getting his learn on, Ben enjoys doing freelance PR work. His favorite books include The Sun Also Rises, Kitchen Confidential, and Dune. He has read more than his fair share of Star Wars literature.

Mr. Ben has been working with Ken Foster, Karen Beninato, and Maple Street’s owner, Donna Allen, to get the Healing Center store prepped for the opening on August 28, 2011. We all want to thank our on-call handyman, Dean, for his work.

E-mail Ben.

Beth Fox, Bookseller back to top

Elizabeth Fox received her Bachelor of Arts in English with a concentration in Creative Writing from Southeastern Louisiana University in 2008; she is currently pursuing her Master of Arts in English, with emphasis in Professional Writing and Publishing, there as well. Elizabeth resides in Hammond with Matthew, her fiance, and Yoshi, her dog, but cannot wait for the “big move” after graduation to New Orleans, where she’ll start the next phase of her life. “Beth” enjoys collecting childrens’ books and her favorite writers are various nineteenth-century authors such as Anne Bronte, as well as local Louisianian Tim Gautreaux.

E-mail Beth.

Ken Foster, Bookseller back to top

Ken Foster is a writer and reader. His books include the memoir The Dogs Who Found Me and the short story collection The Kind I’m Likely to Get. His work has appeared frequently in Salon.com, Time Out New York, Bark, and other publications and has been translated into German, Arabic, Japanese and Turkish. Some of his favorite books are William Maxwell’s They Came Like Swallows, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Good Squad and Jim Gorant’s The Lost Dogs. He lives in the Lower Ninth Ward with his dogs: Brando, Zephyr, Douglas and Bananas.

E-mail Ken.

Sara White, Bookseller back to top

Sara White is a printmaker and resident of the Bayou St. John neighborhood. She got her start selling books with Crescent City Books in the French Quarter, where she worked from 2007-2010. Sara enjoys printed ephemera and reading books of all sorts. Some of her favorites include Maxfield Parish illustrations, John Steinbeck, and early Black Sparrow Press publications. Sara sells letterpress goods locally and on etsy.

E-mail Sara.

Sarah Sky, Bookseller back to top

Sarah Sky spends most of her time teasing something beautiful and useful out of chaos, whether as a used bookseller, zine-writer, costumer, or a musician. She has sewn professionally for eleven years for living history museums, circuses, theater, ballet, and Film. After moving every two years of her young life, she discovered books, zines, and music provided a constant friend and an escape from small town mentalities. She moved to New Orleans to be able to find a confluence for her passions. She asserts that The Crying of Lot 49 is actually non-fiction.

E-mail Sarah.

Michael Glaviano, Bookseller back to top

In middle school Michael was briefly ranked among the ten best American players of a game called Propaganda, but he failed to parlay this into a career as child-god. He was born and raised in New Orleans and got his B.A. at LSU, where he studied English and philosophy. A writer, editor and bookseller, he spends almost all of his waking hours squinting at text. He likes literature with a sense of criticism and criticism with a sense of humor. Some of his favorite writers are Roland Barthes, John Berryman, Judith Butler, Anne Carson, Stuart Dybek, Barry Hannah, bell hooks, Frederic Jameson, Karl Jaspers, Emmanuel Levinas, Ben Lerner, Ariana Reines, George Saunders, and David Foster Wallace.

E-mail Michael.