Launched in 2003, the festival was created by the NO/AIDS Task Force as a means to raise awareness about HIV/AIDS and also to bring together the glbtq literary community in New Orleans.

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The name "Saints and Sinners" was suggested by mystery writer and NO/AIDS Educational Director, J.M. Redmann.

Within a few years, the festival grew in significance and now attracts about 250 glbtq writers, publishers, and readers from all over the United States.

The four-day festival typically features panel discussions, writing workshops, master classes, and public readings and performances. In the past, the festival has sponsored a full-length playwriting contest and currently hosts a short fiction contest.

Saints and Sinners founder and Executive Director Paul Willis, co-editor of the Lambda Award-winning anthology Love, Bourbon Street (2007), sees the festival as a means of promoting literature and its role in glbtq life.

As he observes, "Literature has long nurtured hope and inspiration, and has provided an avenue of understanding. A steady stream of GLBT novels, short stories, poems, plays, and non-fiction works has served to awaken lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and transgendered persons to the existence of others like them, to trace the outlines of a shared culture, and to bring the outside world into the emotional passages of GLBT life."

In the early years of the festival, fundraising dinners were featured where donors to the NO/AIDS Task Force could have dinner with visiting authors. The dinners became difficult to coordinate and to work into an increasingly crowded schedule and are no longer held, but they were a significant part of the program in the early years.

The New Orleans-based John Burton Harter Charitable Trust became a major sponsor of the festival in 2010. Their support is particularly important in underwriting the festival's annual short fiction contest. (The John Burton Harter Charitable Trust is a non-profit foundation that aims to preserve, publish, and exhibit the works of the late artist J. B. Harter, in addition to funding scholarships, exhibitions, and projects relating to the artist's lifelong aesthetic and philosophical interests and involvements.)

In 2011, a festival anthology was launched to publish the winning works and contest finalists of the short fiction competition. Saints & Sinners 2011: New Fiction from the Festival, edited by Willis and Amie Evans, featured the winning story, "Fishwives" by Sally Bellerose, as well as works by John Morgan Wilson, Felice Picano, David-Matthew Barnes, 'Nathan Burgoine, J.R. Greenwell, Jeff Lindemann, Tasha C. Miller, Noel Alumit, Suzanne Hudson, Cecilia Tan, and Joe Formichella.

The 2012 volume, also edited by Willis and Evans, features ten stories, including the winner of the contest, "Wasted Courage" by Jerry Rabushka, and the two runners-up: "Pink Moon" by Pat Spears and "Wimpy and Rattlesnake Albert" by Jim Stewart.

The festival has also established a Hall of Fame. Inductees are chosen based on their contributions to the glbtq literary community through various avenues including writing, promoting, publishing, editing, teaching, bookselling, and volunteering.

Saints and Sinners Literary Festival Hall of Fame members include Dorothy Allison, Ann Bannon, Lucy Jane Bledsoe, Maureen Brady, Patrick Califia, Bernard Cooper, Jameson Currier, Mark Doty, Jim Duggins, Otis Fennell, Michael Thomas Ford, Katherine V. Forrest, Nancy Garden, Jewelle Gomez, Jim Grimsley, Tara Hardy, Ellen Hart, Kenneth Holditch, G. Winston James, Michele Karlsberg, Joan Larkin, Lee Lynch, William J. Mann, Stephen McCauley, Val McDermid, Tim Miller, Michael Nava, Achy Obejas, Felice Picano, Radclyffe, J.M. Redmann, David Rosen, Steven Saylor, Carol Seajay, Kelly Smith, Cecilia Tan, Patricia Nell Warren, Jess Wells, and Paul J. Willis.

Most of the Hall of Fame honorees have participated in the festival, as have such other notable authors as Michael Cunningham and Christopher Rice, among many others.

The Saints and Sinners Literary Festival operates as a subsidiary of the annual Tennessee Williams Literary Festival and is underwritten by the John Burton Harter Charitable Trust, private donations, and participant fees.

The contemporary literary awards given specifically to honor glbtq books may be seen as an outgrowth of the modern American gay rights movement, so intertwined are they with the movement for equality.

One of America's most colorful cities, New Orleans boasts a rich tradition for glbtq people and is both a popular travel destination for gay men and lesbians and the home of a diverse glbtq community.

South Carolina native Dorothy Allison refuses to write didactic or romantic illustrations of the lesbian experience, focusing instead on the sheer survival of her lesbian characters in the hostile environment of Southern working-class families.

In a series of five interlinked pulp novels set in Greenwich Village and its homosexual bars in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Bannon provides an important record of lesbian life in a period when few women dared speak openly about homosexuality.

Controversial for defending sadomasochism and pornography, gender outlaw and sexual anarchist Patrick Califia, who recently underwent gender reassignment, is widely admired as a defender of individual freedom.

Award-winning writer Bernard Cooper blurs the boundaries between autobiography, essay, poetry, and fiction in his elegantly crafted works that focus on sexuality, memory, and growing up gay in the 1950s and 1960s.

The acclaimed novelist Michael Cunningham examines gay culture within the context of the larger society.

Author of several volumes of poetry and memoirs, Mark Doty has helped bring the AIDS narrative and the experiences of gay men to a wider audience through resonant prose and a richly stylized poetic voice.

Writer and editor Katherine V. Forrest has played a major role in bringing lesbian fiction to the forefront of the mystery and science fiction genres.

In her poetry, fiction, and essays, Jewelle Gomez seeks to merge her black, feminist, and lesbian identities into an indivisible whole.

By the end of the twentieth century, playwright and fiction writer Jim Grimsley had firmly established himself as a central voice in an exploding, Southern, gay literary renaissance.

Prolific mystery writer Ellen Hart, winner of multiple Lambda Literary Awards, writes "whydunits" rather than "whodunits."

Mississippi-born artist and museum curator J. B. Harter drew and painted throughout his life, but only began showing his homoerotic work soon before he was murdered.

A master of the modern comedy of manners, novelist Stephen McCauley has been praised for his shrewd observations about contemporary morals, his tart dialogue and ironic tone, and his charming, self-deprecating gay male protagonists.

Award-winning mystery writer Val McDermid writes three successful series of novels, including one featuring lesbian investigative reporter Lindsay Gordon.

Performance artist Tim Miller presents shows that are rooted in his own life experiences, but that are also a powerful form of glbtq activism.

Mystery writer Michael Nava has increasingly been recognized as an important novelist whose mature work transcends the limited expectations of a popular and highly specialized genre.

Prolific author Felice Picano, a founding member of the Violet Quill, is also a pioneer in gay publishing, having founded two publishing houses.

J. M. Redmann, the Lambda Award-winning creator of the New Orleans mystery series featuring Micky Knight, writes richly textured novels focused on issues of power and family.

Christopher Rice, the author of five popular, gay-themed suspense thrillers, has also been active in supporting glbtq causes, especially those affecting glbtq youth.

Now best known for his highly successful mystery novels set in ancient Rome, Steven Saylor began his writing career by publishing erotica under the pen-name Aaron Travis.

Patricia Nell Warren is the author of significant novels about American gay culture that exemplify popular adult and young adult mainstream fiction.

John Morgan Wilson is best known today as the author of a gay male mystery series featuring a flawed and often exasperating amateur detective named Benjamin Justice.