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Writer, filmmaker and Gambit second line correspondent Deborah "Big Red" Cotton was honored today at Rising Tide X, the 10th annual conference put on by a group of New Orleans bloggers. She received the group's Ashley Morris Award for her work as a "connector" in the New Orleans community in the years after Hurricane Katrina and the federal floods.

Cotton has been tireless in chronicling the city's second line, brass band and social aid and pleasure club cultures and recently co-created The Community Voices Project, a series of videos interviewing longtime and native New Orleanians about changes in the city.

Cotton was among 19 people who were shot during a second line parade on Mother's Day 2013, a crime which shocked a city that had become inured to violence.?