The Best American Magazine Writing 2013

ROGER ANGELL has been a contributor to The New Yorker since 1944. He became a fiction editor in 1956 and is now a senior editor and staff writer at the magazine. His first contribution to the magazine was a piece of fiction titled “Three Ladies in the Morning.” While stationed in the Central Pacific during the Second World War, where he was the managing editor of the air force enlisted-man’s weekly TIG Brief, he wrote an article for The New Yorker about a bombing mission to Iwo Jima. After his work on Brief, he became a senior editor at Holiday magazine, where he remained from 1947 to 1956. Once on the New Yorker staff, he continued to contribute stories, casuals, and Notes and Comment pieces to the magazine and began reporting on sports. Since 1962 he has written more than a hundred Sporting Scene pieces, mostly about baseball but also on tennis, hockey, football, rowing, and horse racing. In addition, he has written film reviews and, for many years, the magazine’s Christmas verse, “Greetings, Friends!” He continues as one of The New Yorker’s fiction editors, editing the stories of John Updike, William Trevor, and Woody Allen.

Angell’s writing has appeared in many anthologies and has been collected in nine of his own books. The first, The Stone Arbor and Other Stories (1960), is a selection of short stories. A Day in the Life of Roger Angell (1970) is a book of casuals and parodies. His most recent, Let Me Finish (2006), is a collection of his memoir writing. His baseball books include The Summer Game (1972), Five Seasons (1977), Late Innings (1982), Season Ticket (1988), Once More Around the Park ( 1991), A Pitcher’s Story (2001), and Game Time (2003). In February 1997, Random House published Nothing But You: Love Stories from The New Yorker, an anthology of fiction selected by Angell.

Angell has won a number of awards for his writing, including a George Polk Award for Commentary. In 2011 he was the inaugural winner of the PEN/ESPN Lifetime Achievement Award for Literary Sports Writing. He is a longtime ex officio member of the council of the Authors Guild.

PAMELA COLLOFF is an executive editor at Texas Monthly and has been writing for the magazine since 1997. Her work has also appeared in The New Yorker and has been anthologized in three editions of Best American Crime Reporting as well as the e-book collection Next Wave: America’s New Generation of Great Literary Journalists. Colloff is a four-time National Magazine Award finalist. She was nominated in 2001 for her article on school prayer and then again in 2011 for her two-part series, “Innocence Lost” and “Innocence Found,” about wrongly convicted death row inmate Anthony Graves. One month after the publication of “Innocence Lost,” the Burleson County district attorney’s office dropped all charges against Graves and released him from jail, where he had been awaiting retrial. Colloff’s article—an exhaustive examination of Graves’ case—was credited with helping Graves win his freedom after eighteen years behind bars.

In 2013 she was nominated twice more, for “Hannah and Andrew” and “The Innocent Man,” a two-part series about Michael Morton, a man who spent twenty-five years wrongfully imprisoned for the brutal murder of his wife, Christine. The latter earned Colloff her first National Magazine Award.

SABRINA RUBIN ERDELY is an award-winning feature writer and investigative journalist based in Philadelphia. Her work has appeared in Glamour, GQ, Men’s Health, Mother Jones, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and Self, among other national magazines. Her articles have been anthologized in Best American Crime Reporting and have received a number of awards, including a National Magazine Award nomination.

Erdely specializes in long-form narrative writing, especially about crime and health. She has written about con artists, murder investigations, vicious divorces, power brokers, lovable eccentrics, bioweapons, cults, sexual violence, medical ethics, forgotten artists, and teachers who have affairs with students—among other subjects.

DEXTER FILKINS joined The New Yorker in January 2011 and has since written about a bank heist in Afghanistan and the democratic protests in the Middle East. Before coming to The New Yorker, Filkins had been with the New York Times since 2000, reporting from Afghanistan, Pakistan, New York, and Iraq, where he was based from 2003 to 2006. He has also worked for the Miami Herald and the Los Angeles Times, where he was chief of the paper’s New Delhi bureau. In 2009, he won a Pulitzer Prize as part of a team of New York Times reporters in Pakistan and Afghanistan. He was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in 2006–07 and a fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government in 2007–08. He has received numerous prizes, including two George Polk Awards and three Overseas Press Club Awards. His 2008 book The Forever War won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Best Nonfiction Book and was named a best book of the year by the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time, and the Boston Globe.

A teenage finalist for the American Poet’s Prize and former medical student and researcher, CHARLES GRAEBER is an award-winning journalist and contributor to publications including GQ, The New Yorker, New York, Vogue, Outside, Bloomberg Business-week, the New York Times Magazine, and Wired, for which he is a contributing editor. His journalism has received honors such as the Overseas Press Club Award for Outstanding International Journalism and the New York Press Club Prize for Spot News Reportage and has been anthologized in The Best American Business Writing, The Best American Crime Writing, The Best American Science Writing, The Best of Ten Years of National Geographic Adventure, and The Best of Twenty Years of Wired. Born in Iowa, he is now a resident of Nantucket, Massachusetts, but spends his summers in Brooklyn, New York.

CHRIS HEATH has been working since 2004 as a correspondent at GQ, where he has written countless cover stories as well as reported features on Iraqi refugees, post-Katrina New Orleans, and the devastating Japanese tsunami. In 2006, he was nominated for a National Magazine Award in the Profile Writing category for his story about country legend Merle Haggard. He has previously written for Rolling Stone, Details, Telegraph Magazine, and The Face. He is also the author of Feel: Robbie Williams, the best-selling 2004 book about the British pop superstar.

STEPHEN KING was born in Portland, Maine, in 1947. He made his first professional short story sale in 1967 to Startling Mystery Stories. In 1973 Doubleday accepted his novel Carrie for publication. In the years since he has written more than fifty worldwide best-sellers, most recently Doctor Sleep (2013), Joyland (2013), The Wind Through the Keyhole (2012), and 11/22/63 (2011). In 2000 he published On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. He and his wife, novelist Tabitha King, live in Maine and Florida.

DAHLIA LITHWICK is a senior editor at Slate. She writes “Supreme Court Dispatches” and has covered the Microsoft trial and other legal issues for Slate. Before joining Slate as a freelancer in 1999, she worked for a family law firm in Reno, Nevada. Her work has appeared in Elle, The New Republic, the Ottawa Citizen, and the Washington Post. She is coauthor of Me v. Everybody: Absurd Contracts for an Absurd World, a legal humor book. She is a graduate of Yale University and Stanford Law School.

DAPHNE MERKIN is a cultural critic and a contributing writer to Bookforum, Elle, the New York Times Magazine, T, Tablet, and Travel + Leisure. Formerly a staff writer for The New Yorker, where she wrote about film, books, and figures as varied as Sigmund Freud, Marilyn Monroe, and Kurt Cobain, her current work continues to span topics both high and low—including, most recently, living with regrets, Kim Kardashian, her love of Cornwall, and designer Jason Wu. Daphne is the author of a novel, Enchantment, and a collection of essays, Dreaming of Hitler. She lives with her daughter in New York City and is at work on a memoir, The Dark Season.

BRIAN MOCKENHAUPT is a contributing editor at Esquire and Reader’s Digest and is the nonfiction editor at the Journal of Military Experience. Since leaving the U.S. Army in 2005, he has written extensively on military and veteran affairs, reporting from Afghanistan and Iraq, hometowns and hospitals. “The Living and the Dead” won the 2013 Michael Kelly Award.

FRANK RICH joined New York in June 2011 as writer at large, writing monthly on politics and culture and editing a special monthly section anchored by his essay. He is also a commentator on nymag.com, engaging in regular dialogues on the news of the week.

Rich joined the magazine following a distinguished career at the New York Times, where he had been an op-ed columnist since 1994. He was previously the paper’s chief drama critic from 1980 to 1993. His weekly 1,500-word essay helped inaugurate the expanded opinion pages that the Times introduced in the Sunday “Week in Review” section in 2005. From 2003 to 2005, Rich had been the front-page columnist for the Sunday “Arts and Leisure” section as part of that section’s redesign and expansion. He also served as senior adviser to the Times’s culture editor on the paper’s overall cultural-news report. From 1999 to 2003 he was also senior writer for the New York Times Magazine. The dual title was a first for the Times.

He has written about culture and politics for many national publications. His books include Ghost Light: A Memoir and, most recently, The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth from 9/11 to Katrina. Rich is also a creative consultant to HBO, where he is an executive producer of two projects, Veep, a comedy series written and directed by Armando Iannucci and starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and a documentary on Stephen Sondheim.

MIMI SWARTZ, the author, with Sherron Watkins, of Power Failue: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Enron, is an executive editor of Texas Monthly. Previously, she was a staff writer at Talk from April 1999 to April 2001 and a staff writer at The New Yorker from 1997 to 2001. Before joining The New Yorker, she worked at Texas Monthly for thirteen years. In 1996 Swartz was a finalist for two National Magazine Awards and won in the Public Interest category for “Not What the Doctor Ordered.” She was also a National Magazine Award finalist for her November 2005 issue story on tort reform, titled “Hurt? Injured? Need a Lawyer? Too Bad!” and won the 2006 John Bartlow Martin Award for Public Interest, Magazine Journalism, for the same story. In 2013 she won her second National Magazine Award (again in the category of Public Interest), for “Mothers, Sisters, Daughters, Wives,” a compelling look at the state of women’s health care in Texas.

Over the years, Swartz’s work has appeared in Esquire, Slate, National Geographic, Vanity Fair, and the New York Times op-ed page and Sunday magazine. It has also been collected in Best American Political Writing 2006 and Best American Sportswriting 2007. She has been a member of the Texas Institute of Letters since 1994. Swartz grew up in San Antonio and graduated from Hampshire College, in Amherst, Massachusetts. She now lives in Houston with her husband, John Wilburn, and son, Sam.

MICHAEL WOLFF is the author of five books, including The Man Who Owns the News and Burn Rate. He is a long-time writer for New York and Vanity Fair as well as numerous other publications. His work has won many awards and is widely anthologized. He lives in New York City.

ROBERT F. WORTH is a staff writer for the New York Times Magazine. He first moved to the Middle East in 2003 to cover the Iraq war and remained in Baghdad until 2006. He then became the paper’s Beirut bureau chief, reporting from across the region. Since 2011, he has written narrative accounts of the ongoing upheavals in Egypt, Libya, and Yemen for the Times Magazine and the New York Review of Books. He was born and raised in New York City and now lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife and two sons.