Hayden Bixler enjoys reading fiction, judging things, and casting spells. They’ve graduated from Independence High School and are now attending Agnes Scott College in Atlanta. They hope this collection makes you as confused, angry, happy, and inspired as it did them.
Max Chu is a senior at RASFSotA and has big dreams for the CD industry. He’s invested a lot of time and money into collecting compact discs because they’re about to blow up in popularity. How does he know that? You could say that Max Chu has his finger on what’s hot and what’s not. It’s a gift of his.
Hannah W. Duane is a senior in the Creative Writing department at the Ruth Asawa School of the Arts. She enjoys writing, reading, rock climbing, and a nice cup of green tea. Or really, that’s what she says she likes, but she’s sixteen, so how on earth can she be expected to know? Anyway, she hopes you read this book because reading is perhaps the best thing one can do with one’s time.
Olivia Jacob is a freshman at UC Berkeley. She plans to study creative writing, psychology, and philosophy in college to pick apart the secrets of human motivation. This fascination drove many of her choices for BANR’s 2019 collection, as she and her teammates tried to find pieces that held a “quintessentially 2019” quality. She will miss everyone dearly and is grateful for her opportunity to contribute to the program.
Colette Johnson is in her junior year at Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts. She is in the Creative Writing department. When she’s not writing or reading, she spends her time listening to music and discovering different makeup looks.
Althea Kriney is a freshman at McGill University in Montreal. She has been in BANR for three years. She will miss the basement BANR was held in, but only because of the people, as the basement itself was very humid.
Juliana Lamm-Pérez is a junior at Lick-Wilmerding and has two younger sisters that have names also starting with Juli and ending in -a. She speaks Spanish fluently (es chapina), plays volleyball, drums, is in the school dance program, and wears winged eyeliner every day (how? she doesn’t know). Her friends make fun of her fake laugh, which goes “HA ha HA hA,” which she uses for things that aren’t funny enough to be real-laughed at.
Mimoh Lee is a junior at Lick-Wilmerding High School this fall. She loves cooking and baking, hanging out with friends, reading, listening to music, and playing with her dog Nessie. She plays volleyball and lacrosse and has been doing tae kwon do for eight years. Her biggest pet peeves are when the pockets in jeans stick out, and celery.
Xuan Ly is a junior at Ruth Asawa School of the Arts. While she was writing this bio, she was sitting in a black fishnet hammock, swinging over the ocean on her family’s seafood farm in Vietnam, thinking about her dog and how excited she is for you to read this year’s collection!
Huckleberry Shelf is a freshman at Columbia College Chicago, studying poetry. This was his second and final year at BANR. He hopes that the BANR committee next year will construct a paper model of him and burn him in effigy, honoring forever his contributions to the history and culture of the greater BANRsphere—or at least he hopes they will miss him a little.
Annette Vergara-Tucker is a freshman at UC Santa Cruz. They hope that you take the time to seriously reflect on the writing that the committee selected for this year’s Best American Nonrequired Reading anthology. The pieces the committee encountered this year were incredibly reflective, moving, amusing, and entertaining, and they look forward to the book’s publication. Annette will sincerely miss BANR, after being a member for four years, and loves the program and students deeply!
Very special thanks to Dave Eggers, Nicole Angeloro, Mark Robinson, and Molly Egan. Thanks also to Daniel Gumbiner, Clara Sankey, Sheila Heti, Sarah Vowell, Rachel Kushner, Adam Johnson, Daniel Handler, Dasha Bulatova, Mandy Workman, Annie Roach, Madeline Wright, Chad Buffington, Natalie Cantrell, Meg Schoerke, Catherine Fung, Rose Ludwig, sam sax, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Leah Tumerman, Jessica Calvanico, Rosie, Ezra and Amos, Laura Brief, Daniel Cesca, Doug Keller, Kaitlin Steele, Lauren Broder, Maggie Andrews, Tierra Alston-Johnson, Caroline Moon, Shida Zimani, Anna Griffin, Cecilia Juan, Oakailey Okai, Kona Lai, Arfi Oktavianti, Eric Cromie, Sunra Thompson, Claire Boyle, Caroline Kangas, Emily Ballaine, Diana Adamson, Marisela Garcia, Veronica Ponce-Navarrete, Juliana Sloane, Vanessa Baker, Nicholas Watson, Deborah Kang, Jenny Vu, Lisa Lopez, Monica Mendez, Marilyn Alvarez, Nirvana Felix, Kate Bueler, Jonathon Ho, Leigh Ann Coleman, Alma Zaragoza-Petty, Francisco Prado, Timothy Huynh, Kimberly Arteaga, Sam Lozano, Hannah Bardo, Leo Harrington, Paola Gonzalez, Thamara Torres, and Bianelle Vasquez.