Ogden Honors College Selects Alumna-Written Bestseller as 2026 Shared Read

Alumna Jordan LaHaye Fontenot's national bestselling memoir Home of the Happy: A Murder on the Cajun Prairie, a book that began as her Honors capstone, has been selected as the 2026 Ogden Honors College’s shared read. Fontenot will return to LSU for Honors Convocation on Monday, August 31.

The Roger Hadfield Ogden Honors College has selected Home of the Happy: A Murder on the Cajun Prairie by alumna Jordan LaHaye Fontenot as its 2026 shared read. All incoming Honors students will read the book this summer before arriving on campus in August, and Fontenot will speak at Honors Convocation on Monday, August 31, 2026 at 7:30 p.m. in the Union Theater.

Released in April 2025, Home of the Happy is a national bestselling true crime memoir centered on the 1983 kidnapping and murder of Aubrey LaHaye, a prominent banker, farmer, and businessman in Evangeline Parish, and Fontenot's great-grandfather. The book follows Fontenot's reinvestigation of the case more than four decades later, weaving family memoir, investigative journalism, and Louisiana cultural history into a single narrative rooted in the small-town landscape of rural Louisiana.

The book will serve as a core text in more than 30 sections of HNRS 2000 across the 2026–27 academic year. HNRS 2000, currently titled “Critical Analysis: Louisiana–Where Are We Headed?” is a required course for students in the Ogden Honors College pursuing one of the minors or Honors Traditions in Critical Thought and Scholarship (TRACTS) bachelor’s degree. The course uses Michael Sandel's Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? as a philosophical framework to engage students with enduring ethical questions about fairness, accountability, and civic responsibility, while developing their understanding of Louisiana's physical environment and the challenges shaping the state's future. Through the LaHaye case presented in Home of the Happy, students will consider how local histories are preserved through storytelling, faith, and family ties, and how questions of justice and responsibility unfold within close-knit communities.

About the Author

Jordan LaHaye Fontenot is a writer and editor born and raised in Acadiana, the culturally rich region of South Louisiana that shapes much of her work. A 2018 graduate of LSU and the Ogden Honors College, she received the 2018 Sarah Sue Goldsmith Award for Nonfiction, and her writing has appeared in regional and international publications including inRegister, Atlas Obscura, and the Oxford American. She has served as managing editor of Country Roads Magazine since 2018, and has been featured at the Louisiana Book Festival, the Delta Mouth Literary Festival, and the annual Society of Professional Journalists Conference. She was Writer-in-Residence at NUNU Arts and Culture Collective in Arnaudville in 2022 and 2023.

For Fontenot, the selection carries personal weight. Home of the Happy began as her Ogden Honors College capstone under the mentorship of LSU associate professor of English Joshua Wheeler, who encouraged her to expand what she had envisioned as a long-form essay into a full book proposal.

"What a remarkable full-circle moment it is to now be invited to stand on that stage with my own book," Fontenot said of returning to LSU as the Honors Convocation speaker, "and perhaps help some student realize that your dreams don't have to be theoretical. This can really happen, if you put the work in!"