Contributors

James Agee was a poet, novelist, journalist, film critic, and social activist. His best-known work is Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a nonfiction book about the lives of poor Southern farmers, on which he collaborated with photographer Walker Evans. A native of Knoxville, Tennessee, Agee died of a heart attack in 1955 at the age of forty-four.

David Barsamian is the founder and director of Alternative Radio in Boulder, Colorado. For more information about the Chomsky Archive — a collection of his interviews with Noam Chomsky — call (800) 444-1977 or visit www.alternativeradio.org.

Chris Bursk is a poet and decision-making counselor for inmates and parolees. He lives in Langhorne Manor, Pennsylvania, and teaches at Bucks Community College.

Otis Haschemeyer has an MFA from the University of Arkansas and was a recent Stegner Fellow. He currently lives in Paris, where he is working on a novel.

Stephen J. Lyons’s book A View West of the Divide will be published next year by Globe Pequot Press as part of its “Everyday Life in America” series. His work also appears in the University of Iowa Press anthology Father Nature: Fathers as Guides to the Natural World and in a new anthology of writing from the online magazine Salon. He lives in Monticello, Illinois.

Susan Parker’s memoir Tumbling After (Crown) has been optioned for film rights by HBO. She teaches writing classes in the Bay Area and is currently enrolled in the MFA program at San Francisco State University.

Sy Safransky is editor of The Sun.

Carroll Susco lives in Fairfax, Virginia, and holds an MFA from the University of Pittsburgh. She writes that she has just completed a novel about psychics, depressives, and mushroom takers — and “Yes, Buddy, it has structure.” The stigma of mental illness persists in her life, as do its effects. “Only through understanding,” she says, “can we heal the wounds.”

Ben Brown is a photographer living in Brooklyn, New York.

Irving Goldworm started taking pictures in 1962. Before that he was “an English major and left-of-center snob who thought that pictures were for people who moved their lips when they read.” He lives in Sherman Oaks, California.

Krissy Hall lives and takes photographs in Newton, Georgia.

Jeffery Hersch lives in Denver, Colorado. As he ages, he finds himself taking photographs of dark, cold places.

Marie Huard lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her photograph in this issue was taken in New York City with a homemade pinhole camera. “It’s fun to use,” she writes, “because I can set it in odd places and not worry about it getting broken.”

Photographer Michael Kane lives in Austin, Texas. After college, he struggled to come to terms with the “bizarre and unwelcoming” world of business. He once held the title of administrative manager, but it didn’t last. “Someone heard me make fun of the dress code,” he says.

Jennifer Meranto is a fine-art photographer based in the West Indies.

Jacqueline Moreau lives with her teenage son in White Salmon, Washington. Although she thinks of herself first and foremost as a photographer, to pay the bills she’s worked as a census taker, peach picker, and forest-fire lookout.

Photographer Dion Ogust grew up in New York City and found refuge in Woodstock, New York.

Photographer Gordon Stettinius lives in Richmond, Virginia, and publishes the online magazine Eye Caramba.

Gregory Thorp is a photographer living in New Haven, Connecticut.

Mark Townsend is a busy and prolific photographer who lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Hiroshi Watanabe was born in Sapporo, Japan, and moved to Los Angeles in 1975 to work in television advertising production. Since 2000, he has devoted himself entirely to photography, traveling the world and taking pictures of whatever intrigues him. His work can be viewed online.