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Clayton Delery is a Louisiana native who was raised in the New Orleans area. He has a B.A. and an M.A. from the University of Louisiana, Lafayette, and a Ph.D. from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.  

 

For twenty-six years, he was a member of the faculty at the Louisiana School for Math, Science, and the Arts, one of the nation's premier high schools for academically gifted students.

 

Though he was an English teacher, in the later years of his career he found his interests shifting to LGBT+ History. His book, The Up Stairs Lounge Arson (McFarland, 2014) is a nonfiction account of the deadliest fire New Orleans has ever seen. Until the Orlando Pulse shooting in 2016, this fire was also the largest mass-killing of LGBT people in the nation's history. His new book: Out for Queer Blood: The Murder of Fernando Rios and the Failure of New Orleans Justice (Exposit, 2017), tells the story of three young men who decided to entertain themselves one weekend by beating up a gay man. In the process, they killed him.  

 

Clayton Delery retired from teaching in 2015. He currently lives and writes in New Orleans..  

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