LYNDA BARRY is a cartoonist and writer. She has authored twenty-one books and received numerous awards and honors. Her book One! Hundred! Demons! was required reading for all incoming freshmen at Stanford University in 2008. She is an associate professor of interdisciplinary creativity and director of the Image Lab at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
NAOMI BECKWITH holds degrees from Northwestern University and the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. She is the Marilyn and Larry Fields Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and focuses on conceptual practices in contemporary art, especially work that engages discourses of blackness. She has curated several exhibitions in the United States and internationally. In 2015 she cocurated, with Dieter Roelstraete, The Freedom Principle, an exhibit that explored art and music from Chicago’s South Side from the midsixties to the present.
JERRY BOYLE is a civil litigation attorney who works for Alvin W. Block & Associates in Chicago. He works pro bono on cases involving activism, free speech, and public demonstrations. Hailing from a large family of Irish lawyers, Boyle is a member of the National Lawyers Guild. Along with other members of the Guild, he was on hand to work as a legal observer during the demonstrations and police activity at the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio.
JEFFREY BROWN grew up in Belmont, Massachusetts. Currently a senior correspondent for the PBS NewsHour, Brown worked early in his career for the Columbia University Seminars on Media and Society, producing public television programs on political topics. In 1988 he began working as an economics reporter for The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour. His poetry collection The News was published in 2015.
NEKO CASE began her career as a singer and songwriter in the Pacific Northwest, playing drums for various punk bands in the early nineties. Case recently released an eight-album vinyl box set of her complete solo discography titled Truckdriver, Gladiator, Mule. She also performs with Canadian-bred rock band The New Pornographers.
RACHEL COHEN is a nonfiction writer and professor at the University of Chicago. She is the author of A Chance Meeting and Bernard Berenson: A Life in the Picture Trade. She has written for publications such as the New Yorker, the Believer, the Threepenny Review, and the London Review of Books, and is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship for her writing about art. Sophie Degan is, at ninety, still reading and translating poetry.
ROGER EBERT (1942–2013) was an acclaimed journalist and film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times. He covered sports for the Daily Illini as a student at the University of Illinois in the early sixties and began his career as a film critic while a PhD student at the University of Chicago in 1967. He gave up his graduate work and went on to become the first film critic to win the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1975.
HELEN FISHER is a biological anthropologist, a Senior Research Fellow at the Kinsey Institute, a member of the Center for Human Evolutionary Studies in the Department of Anthropology at Rutgers University, and chief scientific advisor to Match.com. Fisher uses fMRI brain scanning, as well as evolutionary and cross-cultural data, to understand human romantic love and attachment and current trends in human family life. Her six books include Anatomy of Love, Why We Love, and Why Him? Why Her?
MATT FITZGERALD is the senior pastor of Saint Pauls United Church of Christ in Chicago, one of the oldest churches in the city and one of the first congregations in the United States to affirm, welcome, and marry LGBTQ Christians. He hosts Christian Century magazine’s award-winning Preachers on Preaching podcast and is a regular contributor to the Stillspeaking Daily Devotional. He lives in Chicago with his family.
LEOPOLD FROEHLICH worked for Forbes early in his journalism career. In 1991 he joined Playboy as copy chief and eventually became managing editor, leaving the magazine in 2013. He is currently senior editor at Lapham’s Quarterly in New York City.
AMY FRYKHOLM is a Colorado-based writer and editor of the media column at the Christian Century. She holds a PhD in literature from Duke University and is currently at work on a book about the seventh-century desert saint Mary of Egypt. Frykholm has described her writing as dialogic, involving dialogue with her subjects so that other voices speak through her writing. She is the author of four books of nonfiction, including Rapture Culture: Left Behind in Evangelical America, Julian of Norwich: A Contemplative Biography, and See Me Naked: Stories of Sexual Exile in American Christianity.
ROXANE GAY is author of Ayiti, An Untamed State, and the best-selling Bad Feminist. A founding editor of the literary journal Pank and of Tiny Hardcore Books, a small press dedicated to publishing small-format books, Gay is a professor of English at Purdue University and an opinion writer for the New York Times.
DANIEL HANDLER is the author of six novels, including Why We Broke Up, which won a Michael L. Printz Honor, the national best seller We Are Pirates, and the forthcoming All the Dirty Parts. As Lemony Snicket, he is responsible for numerous books for children, including the thirteen-volume A Series of Unfortunate Events, the four-volume All the Wrong Questions, and The Dark, which won the Charlotte Zolotow Award. Handler continues to serve as the adjunct accordionist for the Magnetic Fields, among other musical projects, and he serves as executive producer and writer for the Netflix production of A Series of Unfortunate Events. He lives in San Francisco with the illustrator Lisa Brown, to whom he is married and with whom he has collaborated on several books and one son.
CHRIS HEDGES is a journalist, activist, and ordained Presbyterian minister who is currently a columnist for Truthdig, a progressive journal of news and opinion. He began his career as a war correspondent, reporting on the Falklands War from Argentina for National Public Radio. He has published several books, including Death of the Liberal Class, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, and the best-selling American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. His book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. He was part of a team of New York Times reporters who were awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for their coverage of global terrorism.
ALEKSANDAR HEMON was born in Sarajevo but has lived in the United States since the outbreak of the Bosnian War in 1992. He learned English as an adult and published his first short story in English in 1995. Hemon’s acclaimed works of fiction include The Question of Bruno, Nowhere Man, The Lazarus Project, and The Making of Zombie Wars. Hemon has been awarded a Guggenheim and a MacArthur Fellowship. He lives in Chicago.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS (1949–2011) was a journalist and columnist who wrote for magazines such as New Statesman, the Nation, Slate, and Vanity Fair, covering topics both global and domestic. He advocated ardently for his notion of antitheism, which in his terms emphasized relief “that there is no evidence” for the existence of gods. He often sparked controversy over his public positions, such as his criticism of Mother Teresa’s expansion of Catholic fundamentalism and his support for the Iraq War. Hitchens published several books, including Cyprus, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, and Arguably: Essays, winner of the 2012 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay.
JOLIE HOLLAND is an American songwriter, bandleader, multi-instrumentalist, singer, performer, and author. Her albums include The Living and the Dead, Pint of Blood, and Wine Dark Sea. In a review on National Public Radio, critic Stephen Thompson lauded her music for combining blues, rock, jazz, and soul into “a sound that lands halfway between dusty rural Americana and grimy New York art-rock.” Holland writes an advice column on her website.
KAY REDFIELD JAMISON is a clinical psychologist who specializes in mood disorders, especially bipolar illness. Her writing has been widely influential in both academic and public settings, raising awareness of mental illnesses that often go untreated. Her books include Nothing Was the Same: A Memoir, Exuberance: The Passion for Life, and Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide. A 2001 MacArthur Fellow, Jamison is a professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Her most recent book is Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character.
XENI JARDIN worked as a web developer before starting a career in journalism in 1999. She is a journalist and commentator on digital media, appearing on popular TV news stations such as CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News. She is a founding partner and coeditor of the blog Boing Boing and is executive producer and host of the Webby-honored Boing Boing Video.
TRACEY JOHNSTONE is a midwife, poet, human-rights activist, and author of legislation for the regulation of midwifery.
MARIAME KABA is an organizer, educator, and curator whose work focuses on ending violence, dismantling the prison industrial complex, and supporting youth leadership development. She is the founder and director of Project NIA, a grassroots organization with the long-term goal of ending youth incarceration. After spending twenty years based in Chicago, Kaba has returned to New York City, her hometown.
ROB KENNER is a music journalist who lives in New York City. His reviews and articles appear in the New York Times, National Public Radio, Complex, Mass Appeal, and Billboard. He is the founder and publisher of Boomshots, an online mixed-media platform that publishes news, commentary, and interviews on reggae, dancehall, rap, and related musical genres. Kenner is also the author of a forthcoming history of reggae’s worldwide impact.
OMAR KHOLEIF is a writer and the Manilow Senior Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. He is the author or editor of over twenty books of narrative prose, art criticism, and fiction, including You Are Here: Art After the Internet, Moving Image, Fear Eats the Soul, How to Be Brown in America, and Goodbye World! A specialist in modern and contemporary art, Kholeif is also a scholar of contemporary artist film, video, and emerging technology, with a particular focus on politics, narrative, and geography in a global context. Kholeif was born in Egypt and spent a large portion of his career in England, where he was a curator at the Whitechapel Gallery.
WILLIAM JAMES LENNOX JR. is a retired US Army three-star lieutenant general. After graduating from West Point, he served various assignments in the field artillery and held a number of staff positions, including a White House Fellowship as special assistant to the secretary of education. Lennox became the fifty-sixth superintendent of the United States Military Academy at West Point in 2001. He holds a PhD in literature from Princeton University and is currently the president of Saint Leo University.
IAIN MCGILCHRIST is a psychiatrist and philosopher who lives off the coast of northwest Scotland on the Isle of Skye. His work argues that the mind and brain can be understood only within the broad contexts of our physical and spiritual existence and of the wider human culture in which they arise. McGilchrist studied English at Oxford, but a lifelong interest in philosophy led him to train in medicine, later conducting research in neuroimaging at John Hopkins. He is a Quondam Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford; a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists; a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts; and a former consultant psychiatrist and clinical director at the Bethlem Royal and Maudsley Hospital, London. His most recent publication is The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. A feature film on his work is due for release in 2017.
PANKAJ MISHRA is a writer who was born in North India. After moving to Mashobra, a Himalayan village, in 1992, Mishra began writing reviews and essays for various Indian publications. His first book, Butter Chicken in Ludhiana: Travels in Small Town India, described the cultural effects of globalization in India. He has published eight books, most recently Age of Anger: A History of the Present. A recipient of the 2014 Windham-Campbell Prize for nonfiction, Mishra also writes political essays for the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, the Guardian, the New Yorker, and the London Review of Books.
ALFRED MOLINA is an English actor who was born in London to an Italian mother and a Spanish father. Molina made his film debut as Indiana Jones’s guide in Raiders of the Lost Ark. He has appeared in many British and American television programs and stage productions. He is best known for his roles in films such as Maverick, Spider-Man 2, Chocolat, The Da Vinci Code, An Education, Rango, and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time.
MOMUS is the artist name of the Scottish musician Nick Currie. Since the early eighties Momus has been releasing singer-songwriter albums on independent labels. The Guardian called him “the David Bowie of the art-pop underground.” In the nineties he started blogging in various forms, and he has written journalism about technology, art, and design. He has published books of speculative fiction and appeared as a performance artist offering “unreliable tours” and “emotional lectures.” He lives in Osaka, Japan.
NATALIE Y. MOORE is a reporter for WBEZ, Chicago’s National Public Media station. She joined the station in 2007 after working as a reporter for the Detroit News, the St. Paul Pioneer Press, and the Associated Press in Jerusalem. Moore is coauthor of the books Deconstructing Tyrone: A New Look at Black Masculinity in the Hip-Hop Generation and The Almighty Black P Stone Nation: The Rise, Fall, and Resurgence of an American Gang. Her latest book is The South Side: A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregation.
NALINI NADKARNI is an ecologist who conducted groundbreaking research on Costa Rican rain forest canopies in the eighties. She continues to study the effects of forest fragmentation on biodiversity and community function, especially in her field sites in Costa Rica and Washington State. Nadkarni also participates in several outreach efforts to present research results to nonscientific audiences, including artists, faith-based groups, urban youth, and incarcerated men and women. She is a professor of biology at the University of Utah, the author of Between Earth and Sky: Our Intimate Connections to Trees, and coeditor of Forest Canopies and Monteverde: Ecology and Conservation of a Tropical Cloud Forest.
ETIENNE NDAYISHIMIYE is a former Batwa parliamentarian in the East Central African nation of Burundi. As a child he was forced to flee Burundi due to its civil war, living as a refugee for three years in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Founder of UNIPROBA, a human rights nonprofit advocating for Batwa equality, he also mentors many young Batwa leaders.
ANDERS NILSEN has published eight books of comics and graphic narrative, including Big Questions, The End, and Poetry is Useless, as well as the coloring book A Walk in Eden. He has received three Ignatz Awards, a small-press comics prize, and the Lynd Ward Graphic Novel Prize. Nilsen currently resides in Portland, Oregon.
WILL OLDHAM writes and records songs under the stage name Bonnie “Prince” Billy and has been widely admired for his music’s unique combination of Carnatic, country, and punk. Oldham had originally pursued an acting career, moving to Los Angeles in the late eighties and performing the role of Miles in Thousand Pieces of Gold. He has released over fifteen albums, most recently Best Troubadour. He has also collaborated with many artists, including The Cairo Gang, Dawn McCarthy, Mike Aho, Zach Galifianakis, and Kanye West.
FERNANDO PEREZ is a retired professional baseball player. He was an outfielder for the Tampa Bay Rays, appearing in the 2008 World Series. Perez now works as an instructor at the School of the New York Times and as a correspondent for VICE.
MICHAELANNE PETRELLA is coauthor of the children’s book Recipe, which she wrote with her sister Angela Petrella. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and writes for McSweeney’s.
NICHOLAS PHOTINOS is the founding cellist of the four-time Grammy Award–winning new music ensemble Eighth Blackbird. Formed in 1996, the ensemble tours throughout the world and has been featured at the 2013 Grammy Awards, on CBS’s Sunday Morning and Bloomberg TV, and in the New York Times. The ensemble holds an ongoing ensemble-in-residence position at the University of Richmond. Eighth Blackbird began their own annual summer festival, the Blackbird Creative Lab, in Ojai, California, in 2017, the same year they won Chamber Music America’s inaugural Visionary Award and were named Musical America’s Ensemble of the Year. On his own, Photinos has performed and recorded with artists such as Björk, Wilco, and The Autumn Defense, and jazz artists such as violinist Zach Brock, bassist Matt Ulery, and singer Grazyna Auguscik. He has recorded for numerous labels, including Cedille, Nonesuch, and Naxos. His first solo album, Petits Artéfacts, is on the New Amsterdam label. He also teaches each summer at the Bang on a Can Summer Festival in North Adams, Massachusetts.
ARCHIE RAND is a Brooklyn-based artist whose work is displayed around the world. His murals have been commissioned by several synagogues, including the B’nai Yosef Synagogue in Brooklyn and Anshe Emet Synagogue in Chicago. Rand has also produced collaborative work with poets, including John Ashbery, Bill Berkson, Clark Coolidge, Robert Creeley, Bob Holman, David Lehman, Lewis Warsh, and John Yau. Rand’s works are included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Whitney Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. He is currently Presidential Professor of Art at Brooklyn College.
RICHARD RAPPORT is a clinical professor of neurosurgery at the University of Washington’s School of Medicine and is an attending physician at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle. His research primarily focuses on the surgical management of epilepsy, anticonvulsant drugs, and the localization of speech and language. Rapport has been involved in issues of social justice, and his literary essays are seen widely in various forms. Several of his nearly forty published essays have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and one was noted in Best American Essays. He is the author of Nerve Endings: The Discovery of the Synapse and Physician: The Life of Paul Beeson. He lives in Seattle with his wife, the writer Valerie Trueblood.
CHE “RHYMEFEST” SMITH is a writer, activist, teacher, and hip-hop artist from Chicago’s South Side. He has released three solo albums and shared cowriting credits on several songs, including Kanye West’s “Jesus Walks,” which won a Grammy in 2005. Smith took a break from music in order to become more politically active in Chicago. He ran for the Chicago City Council in 2011, narrowly losing in a runoff to the incumbent alderman. Along with Kanye West and Donnie Smith, he cofounded Donda’s House in 2013. The nonprofit arts program provides art instruction to youth in at-risk communities.
RICHARD RORTY (1931–2007) was an important American philosopher best known for revitalizing the school of American pragmatism. Rorty was born in New York City to a politically active family and educated at the University of Chicago and Yale University. He served as a professor emeritus of comparative literature at Stanford and was the author of several books, including Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, in which he articulated one of his core positions, a critique of the long-held assumption that knowledge “mirrors” the natural world.
ALEX ROSS has been the music critic of the New Yorker since 1996. His first book, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, won a National Book Critics Circle Award and the Guardian First Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His second book is the essay collection Listen to This. He is now at work on Wagnerism: Art in the Shadow of Music. Ross has received an Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Belmont Prize in Germany, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a MacArthur Fellowship.
FRED SASAKI edits Poetry magazine’s prose feature The View from Here, from which the essays in this book are gathered. He is the art director of Poetry magazine and a gallery curator at the Poetry Foundation. He authored Real Life Emails, a book of deluded emails, and the zine series FRED SASAKI’S AND FRED SASAKI’S FOUR-PAGER GUIDE TO: HOW TO FIX YOU. In 2004 he founded the Chicago Printers Ball, an annual celebration of poetry and printmaking. He is also cofounder of the Homeroom 101 pop and subculture show.
MARY SCHMICH is a Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist for the Chicago Tribune and wrote the Brenda Starr comic strip from 1985 to 2011. She also teaches yoga, plays mandolin and piano, and, with fellow columnist Eric Zorn, hosts an annual holiday musical event in Chicago to raise money for the Chicago Tribune Holiday Giving charity fund.
DON SHARE is the editor of Poetry magazine. Among his twelve books are Wishbone, Union, and Bunting’s Persia; he also edited a critical edition of Basil Bunting’s poems, named a Book of the Year by the Times of London and the New Statesman. Miguel Hernández, his book of translations, was awarded the Times Literary Supplement Translation Prize and Premio Valle Inclán. Other books of his include Seneca in English, Squandermania, and The Open Door: 100 Poems, 100 Years of “Poetry” Magazine. He received a VIDA “VIDO” Award for his contributions to American literature and literary community.
LILI TAYLOR is a stage and screen actress who starred in the indie classic Mystic Pizza. She has had roles in many films, including Dogfight, Short Cuts, and I Shot Andy Warhol. Taylor has also appeared in a number of Broadway plays, including The Three Sisters.
HANK WILLIS THOMAS is a photo conceptual artist working primarily with themes related to identity, history, and popular culture. Thomas’s monograph Pitch Blackness was published by Aperture. He has exhibited throughout the United States and abroad and is in numerous public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Collaborative projects include Question Bridge: Black Males and In Search of the Truth with Cause Collective. In 2015 Thomas cofounded For Freedoms, the first artist-run super Pac. Thomas is a member of the Public Design Commission for the city of New York. He received a BFA in Photography and Africana studies from New York University and his MFA/MA in Photography and Visual Criticism from the California College of Arts. Thomas is represented by Jack Shainman Gallery in New York City and Goodman Gallery in South Africa.
SALLY TIMMS is a singer-songwriter who has been a member of the Mekons since 1985. She grew up in the Yorkshire Dales, singing in her church choir and performing at competitive poetry recitals as a child. Timms recorded her first solo album, Hangahar (an experimental, improvised film score), at the age of nineteen with Pete Shelley of the Buzzcocks. Along with her work with the Mekons, she has released several solo albums, including Cowboy Sally’s Twilight Laments for Lost Buckaroos on the alternative-country label Bloodshot Records. She lives in Chicago.
JIA TOLENTINO is a staff writer for the New Yorker website and formerly was the deputy editor of Jezebel and a contributing editor at the Hairpin. She writes on a range of subjects, from music reviews to gender and identity politics. Her essays and criticism have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Pitchfork, and many other places.
JOSH WARN is a retired member of Ironworkers Local Union 25, Detroit, who still occasionally works in the steel industry, and in public schools as a substitute teacher. In addition to memorizing poetry, he loves canoeing Michigan rivers and lakes. He volunteers in religious and social justice organizations. Curiosity has led him to research and publish articles about topics in Michigan history and the fascinating year 1919. Late in life he discovered the joy and satisfaction of singing in a choir, where the choir members tolerate him.
AI WEIWEI is an artist who resides and works in both Berlin and Beijing. His father, the poet Ai Qing, was denounced by China’s Communist Party in 1958, and his family was sent to labor camps, first near the North Korean border and then eventually in Xinjiang province. They returned to Beijing in 1976 after the end of the Cultural Revolution. Ai studied animation at the Beijing Film Academy, then studied art in New York in the early eighties. Upon returning to China a decade later, Ai advocated for experimental artists by publishing underground books and curating avant-garde exhibitions. He has worked in many media, including sculpture, installation, photography, architecture, and film. Ai is an outspoken advocate of human rights and freedom of speech. He received the Václav Havel Prize for Creative Dissent in 2012 and the Amnesty International Ambassador of Conscience Award in 2015.
STEPHEN T. ZILIAK is an economist who pioneered “haiku economics.” He is known for his work on statistics, including the critically acclaimed book The Cult of Statistical Significance and numerous essays on Guinnessometrics, the scientific and statistical legacy of William S. Gosset, Guinness’s Oxford-educated brewmaster. Ziliak is professor of economics and faculty member of the Social Justice Studies Program at Roosevelt University, professor of business and law at the University of Newcastle, faculty affiliate in the Graduate Program of Economics at Colorado State University, and faculty member of the Angiogenesis Foundation.