New Orleans ? He’s t.p. Luce, reading poetry at clubs in Baltimore and Washington, and he’s also Ellis Marsalis III – a Marsalis brother who decided early that music wasn’t his gig.

Under both names, he returned recently to his hometown to promote “thaBloc,” a paperback of black-and-white photos, poetry and prose about his tough East Baltimore turf – the Belair-Edison neighborhood.

It’s very much his book: He produced it, worked with the designer and, with several investors, paid the printer. It’s partly because Marsalis, who has degrees in history and photography from New York University, wanted to keep the price low enough for the people he was shooting to buy it. Big, glossy photography books run $40 to $100 or more, while his book – small and matte – often goes for $15 face-to-face ($20 to $25 elsewhere).

“Literally on my block, I’ve sold about 15 copies – right on my block,” Marsalis said.

In all, he’s sold about 500 copies – almost half the 1,200 needed to break even, he said. He also supports his 12-year-old daughter and 14-year-old son as a freelance computer network specialist.

“I’ve been doing it a long time, so I’m lucky enough to be able to do it freelance and make ends meet,” he says. “They don’t overlap, but they meet.”

Ellis L. Marsalis III reads and shows photos from his book ThaBloc, in front of the Octavia book store in New Orleans.

In Belair-Edison, as Marsalis wandered about photographing children for the book, he realized he needed to get them past the television versions of themselves.

On trips to hear his brothers, Marsalis has had to convince hotel clerks that he wasn’t trying to run a scam with a famous name. So he publishes as t.p. (for “the poet”) Luce.

That’s the name he uses when reading in poetry clubs. “I said, ‘You know, I’ll just do it under my club name. … In some ways, I don’t look on my name as necessarily being my name because it’s my dad’s.”

And, he said, “I don’t want the book to become the book by the Marsalis brother who doesn’t play anything. As a marketing strategy, I think to use the family name may gain legs – but they’re very short legs and don’t last very long.”