The World of Marie Laveau is the culmination of years worth of interest, intrigue, and research about the Voudou Queen. I have always had a general interest in her story. I've played video games that featured her character, listened to songs that spoke of her wrath, and read many books about her life, both fiction and non fiction. I appreciated the exposure..the varying perspectives and the foundational knowledge, but I always felt like there was so much more to learn.

In 2021, I came forward with a discovery I made about Marie Laveau’s husband, Jacques Paris. By then, I had been sitting with the information for two or three years. I finally decided to present the information at a local conference. After that, I reached out to the local press. The discovery seemed too important to Marie Laveau’s legacy, and to the story of Jacques Paris himself, to remain buried in an old research folder.

I began working on this book in 2023, as a continuation of that early research. However, I didn't want it to be just another biographical take on Marie Laveau rooted in the fragmentary archives. That has been done, and very well, I might add. Nor did I want it to be a work of pure fiction, like the screenplay I had written back in 2015.

As a historical anthropologist/archaeologist, I have always been concerned with the material world, and how we as humans interact with it. Stopping short of literally excavating the land Marie Laveau inhabited, I decided to try and excavate her life in a different way. I thought..If I could focus on a few objects that perhaps were important to Marie Laveau's legacy, I could then illuminate her story in a way that hadn't been done before.

I began with a question: what if a few objects connected to Marie Laveau could tell us about her life? What if the house she lived in, the wooden figure seized from a Voudou ceremony, and the antique vase preserved by her family, could help illuminate her world in a way a conventional biography could not?

Keep in mind, the objects do not replace the written record. I still rely heavily on newspapers, court records, property records, oral histories, city directories, maps, and many other documents to interpret what these objects may have meant. The documentary record drives the chronology of the book and the objects simply change how the records are read. Thus, the objects become lenses through which we see Marie Laveau's world.