A native of New Orleans, Charles Suhor was a high school English teacher and supervisor in the public schools of the Big Easy. Subsequently, he moved to Urbana, Illinois, where he was Deputy Executive Director of the National Council of Teachers of English, working extensively as an anti-censorship activist. He had a parallel career as a writer and jazz musician, publishing numerous articles and poems and playing drums with Al Hirt, Pete Fountain, Buddy Prima, and others. Among his books are the Scholastic Composition Series, Teaching Values in the Literature Classroom: A Debate in Print, Dimensions of Thinking, The Book of Rude and Other Outrages, and the award-winning Jazz in New Orleans: The Postwar Years Through 1970. He retired in 1997 to Montgomery, Alabama, where he is a freelance writer, speaker, and percussionist and a member of Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays.