Wayne Curtis is a freelance journalist based on the Gulf Coast, writing often about cocktails, spirits, the people who make them, and the history behind them. He’s a former contributing editor and columnist at The Atlantic, a former columnist for the Daily Beast and American Scholar, and currently writes columns for Garden & Gun and Imbibe magazines. His work has also appeared in Wired, New York Times, Wall St. Journal, American Archeology, Preservation, The Smart Set, and on the radio show Thie American Life. He’s the author of “And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in Ten Cocktails,” and “The Last Great Walk: The True Story of a 1909 Walk from New York to San Francisco and Why It Matters Today.”He currently teaches nonfiction at the graduate writing program of Johns Hopkins University and is a partner in the New Orleans Spirits Competition, an international spirits event that launched in the summer of 2022 in collaboration with Tales of the Cocktail, the nation's leading conference for craft bartenders.