Sam Stephenson is a writer and documentarian who grew up in Washington, North Carolina. He is the author of Dream Street: W. Eugene Smith’s Pittsburgh Project and The Jazz Loft Project: Photographs and Tapes of W. Eugene Smith from 821 Sixth Avenue, 1957–1965, as well as many pieces for periodicals such as The New York Times, The Paris Review, Tin House, and the Oxford American. He is a former fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities, a two-time ASCAP Foundation Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Award winner, and a Lehman Brady Visiting Joint Chair Professor in Documentary Studies and American Studies at Duke University and UNC–Chapel Hill. He founded Rock Fish Stew Institute of Literature & Materials in 2013, authored Bull City Summer: A Season at the Ballpark in 2014, and coauthored Big, Bent Ears: A Serial in Documentary Uncertainty, an experimental collaboration with The Paris Review, in 2015. He lives in Durham, North Carolina, with his wife and their son. You can sign up for email updates here.