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Other Words Author Biographies
Heather Abel earned her master’s degree in fiction writing at the New School in New York City. She has been a reporter and an editor for the High County News and the San Francisco Bay Guardian. She is currently working on a novel about faith, place, and family set in Colorado and California. She lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.
Kathy Acker was born in 1947 and raised in New York City. She attended Brandeis University before moving to the west coast to study writing with the poets David Antin and Jerome Rothenberg at the University of California, San Diego. She did post-graduate work at City University of New York. She worked at a range of jobs (file clerk, secretary, stripper, and porn performer) which leaked into her writing. She was and remains a controversial figure, a writer whose work is not easy to classify, who confronts the reader with difficult issues of identity and sexuality, who provokes mixed reactions from critics and feminists alike. She taught at several schools, including the San Francisco Art Institute. Shortly after her death in 1997 from breast cancer, her friend Richard Kadrey wrote that, more than anything, Acker cared “about the power of words to define the world and shape our thoughts. Whoever controlled the words controlled thought, Kathy knew. She set out to understand and liberate words (and herself) by direct action: She’d seize control of language and reinvent it in her work.”
“Orchids: Half Sacred, Half Profane” is from Faith Adiele’s travel memoir Meeting Faith: An Inward Odyssey, winner of the PEN Beyond the Margins Award. The PBS documentary “My Journey Home” is based on her life growing up in a Nordic-American family and then traveling to Nigeria to meet her father and siblings. She is co-editor of Coming of Age Around the World: A Multicultural Anthology and co-author, under the pen name Jane Harvard, of The Student Body, a scorching campus bestseller. She is currently working on a memoir about growing up Nigerian-Nordic-American. She holds degrees from Harvard, Lesley University, and the University of Iowa. She teaches creative non-fiction at the University of Pittsburgh. To learn more about Adiele and to read her blog, visit: http://www.adiele.com/home.html.
Mexican American author Gloria Anzaldúa intermingles Englishes and Spanishes in her writing as a single, cohesive system of expression. The fluid incorporation illustrates Anzaldúa’s most significant contribution to academic discourse, her application of the term “mestizaje,” which indicates the state of being beyond the binary oppositions inherent in the nationalist labels “Chicano” and “Mexican.” Anzaldúa’s work calls us to embrace a more fluid sense of identity that is not limited by social and territorial borders and is, therefore, rife with the possibility for creativity. Her works include Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (recognized as one of the 38 Best Books of 1987 by Library Journal), poetry, fiction, and children’s books. She has won the National Endowment for the Arts fiction award, the Lesbian Rights Award, and the Sappho Award of Distinction.
Dorie Bargmann grew up in Athens, Georgia, where she attended the University of Georgia as an undergraduate. After receiving the master’s degree in International Affairs from the University of Denver, she spent five years directing potable water projects in Central America. Upon returning to the United States, she pursued a second master’s degree in Nonfiction Writing at the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. Presently she lives in Austin, Texas, where she works as an investigator for the Federal Public Defender’s office. Writing non-fiction is her area of expertise. In addition to “Thirteen More Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” she has published two other essays: “Lionbird” and “After the Ceasefire.” The latter won an award at the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Writers Conference of the Southwest in 2006. “Thirteen Ways” has also been reprinted in The Best Creative Nonfiction, Volume 1.
Nicholas Carr has written a personal blog, Rough Type, since 2005, and has also written a number of “essay blogs” (both of which can be found at www.nicholasgcarr.com). Carr has the knack for stirring debate. In 2005, he posted on Rough Type the “The Amorality of Web 2.0,” which criticized the quality of digital information projects such as Wikipedia, arguing that they have a net negative effect on society. Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales disagreed with much of Carr’s critique but did admit that the two examples Carr put forward were “a horrific embarrassment, and are nearly unreadable crap.” Carr’s book Does IT Matter? (2004), which is about the role of computers in business, was hotly contested by technology giants Microsoft and Intel, among other companies and critics.
Emily Chenoweth holds the M.F.A. from Columbia University. She is the former fiction editor of Publisher’s Weekly. Her work has appeared in Tin House, Bookforum, People, and other publications. Her first novel, Hello Goodbye, about friendship, loyalty, and growing up, has recently been published by Random House.
Charles D’Ambrosio, a short story writer and essayist, grew up in Seattle with an “obscure desire to write.” After graduating from Oberlin College, he attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His stories and essays have been published in The New Yorker and Paris Review, among other periodicals. His first collection of stories, The Point (1995), was a finalist for the Pen/Hemingway Award and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; his essay collection Orphans was also a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. He has been a visiting faculty member at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, as well as an instructor at the Tin House Summer Writers’ Workshop and the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. He has been the recipient of several prestigious awards, including the Whiting Writers Award and a USA Rasmuson Fellowship in Literature. He now lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife.
Lis Goldschmidt grew up in rural Virginia. She is a visual artist whose work has appeared in the Pocket Myths zine series, including Cupid + Psyche and Persephone, and the zine Manifixation. She currently lives in San Francisco and is a graduate student studying Traditional Chinese Medicine. Her favorite number is five.
Judyth Har-Even is the pseudonym used by Ohio native and Jerusalem resident (since 1966) Judy Labensohn. She has been teaching creative writing in informal settings around Israel to both Israelis and tourists since 1992. She teaches in both Hebrew and English and believes the collaboration of group strengths in the writing process can help members to overcome creative blocks. Labensohn’s writing has appeared in Creative Nonfiction, Kenyon Review, Lilith, Hadassah Magazine, Fourth Genre, and various American and Canadian Jewish newspapers.
Michael S. Kimmel is one of the leading researchers in the world on masculinity. Author of over twenty books, he wrote the landmark Manhood in America: A Cultural History (1996), which critics hailed as the definitive work on the subject. A professional speaker as well, Kimmel has been a vocal advocate of seeing manhood as combining “strength with nurturing, personal accountability, compassion and egalitarianism” (Publishers’ Weekly). In 2004, he co-edited the Encyclopedia on Men and Masculinities and The Handbook of Studies on Men and Masculinities.
Jamaica Kincaid was born in St. John’s, Antigua, in 1949. At about the age of sixteen, she moved to New York to pursue a career as an au pair. After leaving the family for which she worked, she studied photography at the New York School for Social Research and also briefly attended Franconia College in New Hampshire. She became a writer for The New Yorker, to which she contributed for about twenty years. Kincaid is the author of nonfiction texts, short stories, and novels, including The Autobiography of My Mother, a novel of a 70-year-old woman looking back on her life in Dominica. In 2000, she was awarded the Prix Femina Étranger for My Brother. She now lives in Bennington, Vermont, with her husband and children.
William Davies King is a professor of theater at the University of California, Santa Barbara. King is a self-proclaimed collector of nothing. His enormous collection of ephemera is economically valueless and lacks currency even in collector circles. The value King recognizes in his collecting is a connection to the creative process as he must make decisions about what to collect and how to present a collection. King’s book Collections of Nothing is a memoir of his life through collecting.
Jason Logan is an illustrator, based in Toronto, and the author of If We Ever Break Up, This is My Book. He has been scribbling away in notebooks on public transportation for a long time.
Field Maloney has written for Slate, The New York Times, and The New Yorker. He comes from a hard-cider-making family and is writing a book about wine in America. He likes to drink beer.
Scott McCloud has been both a theorist and creator of comics since the publication of his first comic, Zot!, in 1984. Active in the comics community throughout his career, he drafted a “Creator’s Bill of Rights” in 1988 to help creators retain the rights to characters they develop. Also an early supporter of webcomics, McCloud is fascinated by the possibilities created by the “infinite canvas” of the web browser, a medium that has fewer spatial limitations than the pages of a book. In 2008, McCloud created a 38-page comic that serves as the user’s manual for Google’s web browser, Chrome.
Bill McKibben grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts, and was president of the Harvard Crimson newspaper in college. He later moved to the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York. His first book, The End of Nature, was published in 1989 and has since appeared in more than 20 languages. He now lives in Ripton, Vermont, with his wife and daughter and is scholar in residence at Middlebury College. Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future was published in 2007 and The Bill McKibben Reader in 2008. McKibben is co-founder and director of 350.org, an international movement to unite the world around solutions to the climate crisis (350 parts per million is the safe upper limit for CO2 in our atmosphere, a level we’ve already surpassed).
John Medeiros’ nonfiction, fiction, and poetry can be found in a broad range of publications, such as Gents, Badboys, and Barbarians: New Gay Male Poetry (1995), Writers against War (2005), and Sport Literate (2008). For Medeiros, writing nonfiction is “often a rebellious act—because we are constantly asked to seek new logic. [And] because of poetry’s sensuous and lyrical effect, the stories that have remained with me are those that carry a certain cadence.” “One Sentence” won the Gulf Coast nonfiction prize in 2005.
Maja Mikula is a Senior Lecturer in Italian Studies at the University of Technology Sydney. With research interests in popular culture, cultural studies, and gender, Mikula is also affiliated with the University’s Contesting Euro Visions Research Group—a group that claims to take “a radically different approach to European cultural identities, concentrating on the popular, the contested, the transcultural and the marginal.”
Rebekah Nathan is the pseudonym of cultural anthropologist Cathy A. Small. A 1967 graduate of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Small has a lifelong interest in the South Pacific and is the author of Voyages: From Tongan Villages to American Suburbs (Cornell, 1997). In 2002, after fifteen years of teaching in American universities, she took a sabbatical and enrolled as a freshman at her own university, moving into a dorm and taking a full course load. The result was My Freshman Year: What A Professor Learned by Becoming a Student, published in 2005 by Cornell University Press. Small is currently professor of anthropology at Northern Arizona University, where she has been active in mentoring and scholarship programs for low-income youth.
Michael Pollan currently serves as the Knight Professor of Science and Environmental Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. He has published several books on food, agriculture, gardening, and architecture, including In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto and the award-winning The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. He is also a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine. To see pictures of the one-room cabin Pollan constructed as a space for writing, check out his website at http://www.michaelpollan.com/writing_house.php.
Miranda Purves, 38, is an editor at Elle magazine in New York City. Among her heroes are the Linux creator Linus Torvalds, environmental crusaders everywhere, and Virginia Woolf, after whom she named her son.
María Cristina Rangel grew up in Washington state, the daughter of migrant farm workers. She is an alumna of Smith College and has received the Gertrude Posner Spencer Prize for excellence in writing both fiction and nonfiction and the Premio El Andar for creative nonfiction. As a Queer Chicana activist, writer, feminist, and Malinchista, she fights for economic justice for women, children, and people of color. Rangel lives with her daughters in Western Massachusetts.
Richard Rodriguez grew up in Sacramento, California, the son of Mexican immigrant parents. He went on to study at Stanford University and Columbia. As an essayist and journalist, Rodriguez often writes about the intersections between his personal experiences and the larger social issues in the Americas. His work challenges hegemonic ideas about race, democracy, purity, identity, geography, and religion. His books include The Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez, Days of Obligation: An Argument with my Father, and Brown: The Last Discovery of America. This last book proposes a new racial politics of confusion, contradiction, and impurity in order to undermine old ideas about race and identity.
George Saunders was raised on the south side of Chicago. In 1981, he received the B.S. in Geophysical Engineering from Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colorado. He has worked as a technical writer, geophysical engineer, doorman, roofer, convenience store clerk, guitarist in a country-and-western band, and knuckle-puller in a slaughterhouse. He has been teaching in the Syracuse University Creative Writing Program since 1997. He is the author of The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil; Pastoralia; and The Braindead Megaphone among others. In 2006, he was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant.
Award-winning journalist and author David K. Shipler graduated from Dartmouth College in 1964 before serving as a navel officer on a destroyer. During his time at The New York Times, Shipler reported from New York, Saigon, Moscow, and Jerusalem, and served as chief diplomatic correspondent in Washington, D.C. His books include The Working Poor: Invisible in America (2004); A Country of Strangers: Black and Whites in America (1998); the Pulitzer Prize-winning Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land (1986); and Russia: Broken Idols, Solemn Dreams (1983). Shipler has received the Martin Luther King Jr. Social Justice Award from Dartmouth College as well as honorary degrees from numerous universities. He has taught at several universities including Princeton, American University, and Dartmouth. He lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland.
Susan Sontag (1933-2004) was an author, filmmaker, and political activist who wrote voluminously. Her notable works include Against Interpretation (1966), On Photography (1977), and Regarding the Pain of Others (2003). On Photography broke new ground in conceptualizing photography as an art form that interprets the world as much as painting and drawing do. She was also an outspoken activist and a critic of western imperialism. Her final nonfiction work, Regarding the Pain of Others, re-examined art and photography from a moral standpoint.
Dean Spade is an Assistant Professor of Law at Seattle University School of Law. In 2002, he founded the Sylvia Rivera Law Project (www.srlp.org), a non-profit law collective that provides free legal services to transgender, intersex and gender non-conforming people who are low-income and/or people of color. Spade’s current research interests include the impact of the War on Terror on transgender rights, the bureaucratization of trans identities, and models of non-profit governance in social movements.
Richard Stengel is the managing editor of Time magazine. After graduating in 1977 from Princeton University, where he played on the basketball team, Stengel was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University in England. In 1993, he collaborated with Nelson Mandela on the latter’s autobiography, Long Way to Freedom; he is also author of January Sun: One Day, Three Lives, A South African Town. Since writing “A Time to Serve,” Stengel has become active in the national service movement. For more information on that movement, visit the website of ServiceNation, a coalition of organizations dedicated to volunteerism (http://www.bethechangeinc.org/servicenation/).
Andrew Sullivan is a British-born journalist, blogger, and political commentator. An openly gay Roman Catholic living as an expatriate in the U.S., Sullivan’s unique personal-political identity has helped make him a prominent critic of American politics and culture. The former editor of The New Republic and current blogger for The Atlantic, Sullivan was one of the first mainstream journalists to embrace the blogging medium. His blog “Daily Dish” can be found at andrewsullivan.com and is updated daily.
Amy Tan was born in Oakland, California, in 1952, after her parents immigrated from China. After receiving her B.A. and M.A. in Linguistics from San Jose University, Tan worked for programs that aid children with developmental disabilities. She also worked as a business writer for large corporations such as IBM until pursuing a career as a freelance writer. Her most notable novels include the following: The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen God’s Wife, The Hundred Secret Senses, and The Bonesetter’s Daughter. Tan’s essays have appeared in The New Yorker and Harper’s. She has also written several children’s books, and her memoir, The Opposite of Fate: Memories of a Writing Life, was published in 2003. Her work has been translated into more than 25 languages.
Kurt Vonnegut was a prolific and provocative American novelist and essayist. He became known for his commingling of satire, black comedy, and science fiction (in 1999, the main-belt asteroid 25399 Vonnegut was named in his honor). Vonnegut’s genre-bending fiction can be seen in such works as Cat’s Cradle (1963) and Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). The latter is a memorial to his experiences as a World War II POW in Dresden, Germany, during the Allied fire-bombing of that city. After writing for nearly half a century, he began to find the “labor” of it disagreeable, choosing instead to focus his creative energies on his artwork, which lingered for years as doodling on the edges of manuscripts. His “felt tip calligraphs” have been likened to his honed writing style. Vonnegut taught writing at Harvard, CUNY, and Smith College. In 2000, he was named State Author of New York. He died in 2007 at the age of 84.
David Foster Wallace was born in Ithaca, New York, but was raised in Philo, Illinois. He received the B.A. from Amherst College in 1985. He is the author of Infinite Jest and A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, among other works. He most recently taught at Pomona College in Claremont, California. He was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant in 1997. “I received 500,000 discrete bits of information today,” he once said, “of which maybe twenty-five are important. My job is to make some sense of it.”
