ELIZABETH WINKLER is a journalist and book critic based in New York. Her essays, profiles, and reviews have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Times Literary Supplement, the Economist, the New Republic, and the Washington Post, among other places. She holds BA in English literature from Princeton University and an MA in English literature from Stanford University.
- p. 278, The Best American Essays 2020.
PHILIP WEINSTEIN, the Alexander Griswold Cummins Professor Emeritus at Swarthmore College, has published widely on nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction. The Society for the Study of Southern Literature chose his Becoming Faulkner (2010) for the C. Hugh Holman Award. "Soul-Error" is the signature essay in his current manuscript of the same title.
- p. 277, The Best American Essays 2020.
STEPHANIE POWELL WATTS won the Ernest J. Gaines Award for her short story collection We Are Taking Only What We Need. Her novel, No One Is Coming to Save Us, was the inaugural American Library Association selection by Sarah Jessica Parker and the winner of a 2018 NAACP Image Award.
- p. 277, The Best American Essays 2020.
Recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Michener Foundation, JERALD WALKER is a professor of creative writing at Emerson College. His essays have appeared in publications such as The Harvard Review, Mother Jones, The Iowa Review, The Missouri Review, Oxford American, and Creative Nonfiction, and he has been widely anthologized. He is the author of The World in Flames: A Black Boyhood in a White Supremacist Doomsday Cult; Street Shadows: A Memoir of Race, Rebellion, and Redemption, winner of the PEN/New England Award for Nonfiction, and How to Make a Slave and Other Essays, which includes "Breathe." This is his fifth appearance in the Best American Essays series.
- p. 277, The Best American Essays 2020.
DAVID L. ULIN is the author or editor of a dozen books, including Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles, shortlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, and Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology, which won a California Book Award. The former book editor and book critic of the Los Angeles Times, he has written for The Atlantic, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Paris Review, and the New York Times, among other publications. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and Lannan Foundation and teaches at the University of Southern California. Most recently he edited the Library of America's Joan Didion: The 1960's & 70s, the first in a three-volume edition of the author's collected works.
- p. 277, The Best American Essays 2020.
ALISON TOWNSEND is the author of The Persistence of Rivers: An Essay on Moving Water, Persephone in America, and The Blue Dress. Emerita professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, she lives in the farm country outside Madison, the inspiration for her essay collection, American Lady: A Natural History of My Search for Home (forthcoming in 2021).
- p. 276-7, The Best American Essays 2020.
MARK SUNDEEN is the author of five books, including The Unsettlers (2017), The Man Who Quit Money (2012), and The Making of Toro (2003). His work has been translated into seven languages and has appeared in the New York Times, Believer, McSweeney's, and many other publications. A contributing editor for Outside magazine, he has held the Russo Chair in Creative Writing at the University of New Mexico and teaches fiction and nonfiction at the Mountainview Low-Residency MFA Program. He lives with his wife and son in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
- p. 276, The Best American Essays 2020.
MARK SULLIVAN is the author of a collection of poetry, Slag, and his poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in many publications, including Alaska Quarterly Review, New England Review, and the Southern Review. He has received a number of awards for his writing, including a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
- p. 276, The Best American Essays 2020.
A. O. SCOTT has been a critic at the New York Times since 2000, writing mostly about film and sometimes about books, music, television, and other subjects. He is the author of Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think About Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth and a distinguished professor in the College of Film and the Moving Image at Wesleyan University.
- p. 276, The Best American Essays 2020.
PETER SCHJELDAHL has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1998 and is the magazine's art critic. He came to the magazine from The Village Voice, where he was the art critic from 1990 to 1998. Previously he had written frequently for the New York Times's Arts and Leisure section. His writing has also appeared in Artforum, Art in America, The New York Times Magazine, Vogue, and Vanity Fair. He has received the Clark Prize for Excellence in Arts Writing from the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute; the Frank Jewett Mather Award from the College Art Association, for excellence in art criticism; the Howard D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, for "recent prose that merits recognition for the quality of its style"; and a Guggenheim fellowship. He is the author of four books of criticism, including The Hydrogen Jukebox: Selected Writings, and Let's See: Writings on Art from The New Yorker. His latest book is Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light: 100 Art Writings, 1988-2018.
- p. 275-6, The Best American Essays 2020.
MATTHEW SALESSES is the author of three novels, Disappear Dopelgänger Disappear, The Hundred-Year Flood, and I'm Not Saying, I'm Just Saying, and two forthcoming books of nonfiction: a craft book, Craft in the Real World (2021), and a collection of essays. He has written for NPR's Code Switch, the New York Times's Motherlode, Gay Magazine, Vice, and many others. He is an assistant professor of English at Coe College.
- p. 275, The Best American Essays 2020.
SUSAN FOX ROGERS is the author of My Reach: A Hudson River Memoir and the editor of eleven anthologies, including Solo: On Her Own Adventure and Antarctica: Life on the Ice, which was created while in Antarctica on a National Science Foundation award for artists and writers. Her most recent collection, When Birds Are Near: Dispatches from Contemporary Writers, celebrates the birding life. "The Other Leopold" is part of a longer work, Learning the Birds: A Mid-life Journey, to be published in fall 2021. Rogers has taught the creative essay, nature writing, and bird-related classes at Bard College since 2001.
- p. 275, The Best American Essays 2020.
Clinton Crockett Peters on Amazon
CLINTON CROCKETT PETERS is an assistant professor of creative writing at Berry College. He is the author of Pandora's Garden (2018) and Mountain Madness (forthcoming in 2021). He has been awarded literary prizes by The Iowa Review, Shenandoah, North American Review, Crab Orchard Review, and Columbia Journal. Peters has been noted four times in the Best American series. He holds an Iowa Arts Fellow, and a PhD in English and creative writing from the University of North Texas. His work also appears in Orion, Southern Review, Utne Reader, Catapult, The Threepenny Review, Electric Literature, and elsewhere.
- p. 275, The Best American Essays 2020.
ALEX MARZANO-LESNEVICH is the author of The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir, which received a Lambda Literary Award, the Chautauqua Prize, and awards in France and Canada. It was translated into eleven languages and is in development with HBO. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, Civitella Ranieri, and the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Marzano-Lesnevich has written for The New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, AGNI, Elle France, and many other publications. They live in Portland, Maine, and are an assistant professor at Bowdoin College. Their next book, Both and Neither, about living beyond the binary, is forthcoming and was excerpted in The Best American Essays 2020.
- The Best American Essays 2022 (p. 288). HarperCollins.
ALEX MARZANO-LESNEVICH is the author of The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir, which received a Lambda Literary Award, the Chautauqua Prize, and awards in France and Canada and was translated into nine languages. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, Yaddo, and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, as well as a Rona Jaffe Award, Marzano-Lesnevich has written for the New York Times, the Boston Globe, Oxford American, Harper's Magazine, and many other publications. They live in Portland, Maine, and are an assistant professor at Bowdoin College. They are at work on a book about gender, from which "Body Language" was adapted.
- The Best American Essays 2020 (p. 274).
JAMAICA KINCAID is a writer, novelist, and professor. Her works include Annie John, Lucy, The Autobiography of My Mother, and Mr. Potter, as well as her classic history of her Antigua, A Small Place, and a memoir, My Brother. Her first book, the collection of stories At the Bottom of the River, won the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction. Kincaid's last novel, See Now Then, was published in 2013. Professor of African and African American studies at Harvard University, Kincaid was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2004. She has received a Guggenheim Award, the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, the Prix Femina Éstranger, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Clifton Fadiman Medal, and the Dan David Prize for Literature in 2017.
- p. 274, The Best American Essays 2020.
- The Best American Essays 1995.
JOSEPH LEO KOERNER is the Thomas Professor of the History of Art and Architecture and Senior Fellow at the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. He is the author most recently of Bosch and Bruegel: From Enemy Painting to Everyday Life (2016). His film The Burning Child was released in 2019.
- p. 274, The Best American Essays 2020.
RON HUETT graduated from Kurt T. Shery continuation high school in June 1995; he received a BA in creative writing from Columbia University's School of General Studies in May 2018. An alumnus of the CRIT writing workshop, Ron teaches third grade in Brownsville, Brooklyn. He is working on his first novel.
- p. 274, The Best American Essays 2020.
GARI FINCKE's latest collection of personal essays, The Darkness Call, won the Robert C. Jones Prize for a book of short prose (2018). Winner of the Flannery O'Connor Prize for Short Fiction and the Wheeler Prize for Poetry for earlier collections, Fincke has published thirty-four books of nonfiction, fiction, and poetry. He founded and then directed the Writers Institute at Susquehanna University for twenty-one years.
- p. 273, The Best American Essays 2020.
BARBARA EHRENREICH is a contributing editor of The Baffler. Her newest book is Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer.
- p. 273, The Best American Essays 2020.
RACHEL CUSK is the author of ten novels and four works of nonfiction, which have won and been shortlisted for numerous prizes. In 2015 Cusk's version of Medea was staged at the Almeida Theatre.
- p. 273, The Best American Essays 2020.
Born in Bosnia, ELVIS BEGO left that country at the age of twelve and now lives in Copenhagen. His fiction and essays ahve appeared in Agni, The Common, Kenyon Review, New England Review, The Threepenny Review, Tin House, and elsewhere. He is at work on a novel and completing a book of stories.
- p. 273, The Best American Essays 2020.
- Back Cover, The Best American Essays 2020.
- Back Cover, The Best American Essays 1993.
JOSEPH EPSTEIN is the editor of The American Scholar. His essays and stories have appeared in Commentary, The New Criterion, Harper's, The Hudson Review, and The New Yorker. His most recent book, a collection of familiar essays, is Once More Around the Block, published by W. W. Norton. His new collection of literary essays, to be entitled A Better Class of Goods, will appear sometime next year.
- The Best American Essays 1987 (p. 316). Ticknor & Fields.
- p. 586, The Best American Essays of the Century.
- Back Cover, The Best American Essays 1992.
- p. 573, The Best American Essays of the Century.
- Back Cover, The Best American Essays 1988.
- Back Cover, The Best American Essays 2009.
- Back Cover, The Best American Essays 2003.
- Back Cover, The Best American Essays 2001.
"As I am not drawn to art that makes me feel good, comfortable, or at ease," writes Joyce Carol Oates, "so I am not drawn to essays that 'smile,' except in the context of larger, more complex ambitions." Born (1938) in Lockport, New York, Oates graduated from Syracuse University in 1960 (having won Mademoiselle's college fiction award a year earlier) and received a master's degree from the University of Wisconsin in 1961. She published the first of more than two dozen novels, With Shuddering Fall, in 1964, and with the novel them (1969) became the youngest writer ever to receive the National Book Award for fiction. Oates taught in the English department of the University of Windsor, in Ontario, from 1967 to 1978, when she moved to Princeton University, where she is Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor. Besides her novels (some of them written under the pseudonym Rosamond Smith) and many volumes of short stories (for which she won an O. Henry Special Award for Continuing Achievement), Oates has published numerous volumes of poetry and plays (many of which have been produced). Her nonfiction includes such literary criticism as The Edge of Impossibility: Tragic Forms in Literature (1972) and New Heaven, New Earth: The Visionary Experience in Literature (1974) and several essay collections: Contraries: Essays (1981), The Profane Art: Essays and Reviews (1983), and (Woman) Writer: Occasions and Opportunities (1988). She served as a guest editor of The Best American Essays 1991.
- p. 583, The Best American Essays of the Century.
- Back Cover, The Best American Essays of the Century.
JOYCE CAROL OATES is the author most recently of Marya: A Life and Raven's Wing, a collection of short stories. Her essay "On Boxing" will be published in an expanded version, with photographs by John Ranard, in 1987. She teaches at Princeton University and helps edit The Ontario Review.
- p. 284, The Best American Essays 1986.
- Back Cover, The Best American Essays 1987.
- p. , The Best American Essays 2018.
- p. 283, The Best American Essays 1986.
DONALD BARTHELME has published many collections of short stories, among them Come Back, Dr. Caligari; Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts; City Life; Guilty Pleasures; Sadness; Amateurs; Great Days; and Overnight to Many Distant Cities. He has also written two novels, Snow White and The Dead Father.
- p. 283, The Best American Essays 1986.
JULIAN BARNES is the author of Metroland, Before She Met Me, and Flaubert's Parrot. He was recently awarded the 1986 E. M. Forster Award by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. His next novel, Staring at the Sun, will be published by Knopf in 1987.
- p. 283, The Best American Essays 1986.
- p. 577, The Best American Essays of the Century.
- Back Cover, The Best American Essays 1986.
CHERYL STRAYED is the author of Wild, Torch, and Tiny Beautiful Things. Her books have been translated into more than thirty languages around the world. Her essays have been published in The New York Times Magazine, Vogue, Salon, and elsewhere and have been selected for inclusion in The Best American Essays three times. She lives in Portland, Oregon.
- The Best American Essays 2015 (p. 223). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Kindle Edition.
- Back Cover, The Best American Essays 2013.
John Jeremiah Sullivan on Amazon
JOHN JEREMIAH SULLIVAN, guest editor, is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and the southern editor of the Paris Review. He's been the recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award, a Pushcart Prize, and an M.F.K. Fisher Distinguished Writing Award. He is the author of Blood Horses: Notes of a Sportswriter's Son and Pulphead: Essays.- Back Cover, The Best American Essays 2014.
- Back Cover, The Best American Essays 2015.
- Back Cover, The Best American Essays 2016.
LESLIE JAMISON is the author of The Recovering, a critical memoir; two essay collections, The Empathy Exams and Make It Scream, Make It Burn; and a novel, The Gin Closet. She directs the graduate nonfiction program at Columbia University.
- p. 274, The Best American Essays 2020.
- Back Cover, The Best American Essays 2017.
- p. 212, The Best American Essays 2019.
- p. 212, The Best American Essays 2019.
- p. 212, The Best American Essays 2019.
- p. 212, The Best American Essays 2019.
DAWN LUNDY MARTIN is an American poet and essayist. She is the author of four books of poems, including Good Stock Strange Blood, winner of the 2019 Kingsley Tufts Award for Poetry. Her nonfiction can be found in n+I, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, The Believer, and The Best American Essays 2019. Martin holds the Toi Derricotte Endowed Chair in English at the University of Pittsburgh and is the director of the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics.
- The Best American Essays 2021 (p. 204). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
- The Best American Essays 2019.
- p. 212, The Best American Essays 2019.
J. DREW LANHAM's work probes the intersections between nature, race, and identity. His book, The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair with Nature, was named a John Burroughs Association Book of Uncommon Merit in 2017, and won the Southern Environmental Law Center's Reed Writing Award in 2018 and the Southern Book Prize. His work appears in Orion, Places Journal, Oxford American, and numerous anthologies. He is the poet laureate of Edgefield, South Carolina, and the author of Sparrow Envy: Poems. He is the Alumni Distinguished Professor of Wildlife Ecology and Master Teacher at Clemson University in South Carolina.
- p. 211, The Best American Essays 2019.
- p. 211, The Best American Essays 2019.
- p. 211, The Best American Essays 2019.
- p. 211, The Best American Essays 2019.
LACY M. JOHNSON is a Houston-based professor, curator, and activist, and is the author of the essay collection The Reckonings, the memoir The Other Side— both National Book Critics Circle Award finalists—and the memoir Trespasses. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Virginia Quarterly Review, Tin House, Guernica, and elsewhere. She teaches creative nonfiction at Rice University and is the founding director of the Houston Flood Museum.
- pp. 210-211, The Best American Essays 2019.
- p. 210, The Best American Essays 2019.
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- The Best American Essays 2021 (p. 201). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
HILTON ALS, guest editor, became a staff writer at The New Yorker in 1994 and a theater critic in 2002. Previously, Als was a staff writer for the Village Voice and an editor at large at Vibe. His first book, The Women, was published in 1996. His most recent book, White Girls, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the winner of the Lambda Literary Award in 2014, discusses various narratives of race and gender. He won the Pulitzer Prize in criticism in 2017.
- Back Cover, The Best American Essays 2018.
- Contributors’ Notes, The Best American Essays 2015.
- p. 2o9, The Best American Essays 2019.
