The Best American Essays 2016 (51 page)

CHARLES COMEY
is a writer living in a little town in New Hampshire with his wife and two boys. He is a frequent contributor to
The Point
. Currently he is at work on his PhD at the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought, where he has been the recipient of a Dolores Zohrab Liebmann Fund Fellowship and the Wayne C. Booth Prize for Teaching. When he’s done, he plans to transform his obscure academic labors into not-boring personal-philosophical nonfiction.

PAUL CRENSHAW
’s stories and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in
The Best American Essays
,
The Best American Nonrequired Reading
,
Glimmer Train
,
Ecotone
,
North American Review
, and
Brevity
, among others. He teaches writing and literature at Elon University. “Names” is one of a collection of essays on his time in the military in the early 1990s.

JAQUIRA DÍAZ
is the recipient of a Kenyon Review Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, the Carl Djerassi Fiction Fellowship from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and an NEA Fellowship to the Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts and Sciences. She has received awards from the MacDowell Colony, the Ragdale Foundation, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, the Elizabeth George Foundation, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Her work has appeared in
The Guardian
,
The Sun
,
The Kenyon Review
,
The Southern Review
,
Ninth Letter
,
Brevity
, and elsewhere.

IRINA DUMITRESCU
is a professor of medieval English literature at the University of Bonn. She recently edited a collection of essays on arts and humanities in crisis titled
Rumba Under Fire: The Arts of Survival from West Point to Delhi
(2016). Her essays can be found in
The Yale Review
,
The Southwest Review
,
Petits Propos Culinaires
, the
Washington Post
, and
The Manifest-Station
. She was nominated for an MFK Fisher Distinguished Writing Award and has been supported by the Whiting Foundation and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

ELA HARRISON
’s poetry, essays, and book reviews have appeared in
New England Review
,
The Georgia Review
,
Cirque Journal
, and
F Magazine
. She also contributes articles on environmental and nutritional issues to online publications, including
BeMore! Magazine
. She holds advanced degrees in classical literature and linguistics (from Oxford, Stanford, and UC Berkeley) and has always studied and worked with herbs. Originally from England and Israel, she has traveled widely and lived in places as diverse as Alaska and Hawaii. Harrison received her MFA from the Rainier Writing Workshop in 2014. Now based in Tucson, Arizona, she translates (including a German encyclopedia project), writes, edits, provides health coaching, and makes herbal remedies and food for people on healing programs.

SEBASTIAN JUNGER
is the
New York Times
best-selling author of
War
,
The Perfect Storm
,
Fire
, and
A Death in Belmont
. “The Bonds of Battle” grew into his most recent book,
Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging
. Together with Tim Hetherington, he directed the documentary
Restrepo
, which won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and was nominated for an Oscar in 2011. He went on to direct
Which Way Is the Front Line from Here?
,
Korengal
, and
The Last Patrol
. He is a contributing editor to
Vanity Fair
and has been awarded a National Magazine Award and an SAIS-Novartis Prize for Excellence in International Journalism. Junger’s essay “The Lion in Winter” was selected by Stephen Jay Gould for
The Best American Essays 2002
. He lives in New York City.

LAURA KIPNIS
is a cultural critic and former video artist who writes frequently on sexual politics, aesthetics, emotion, acting out, bad behavior, and various other crevices of the American psyche. She is the author of six books. The latest is
Men: Notes from an Ongoing Investigation
; previous titles include
How to Become a Scandal
and
Against Love: A Polemic
. The next (just finished!) is
Stupid Sex/Higher Ed
. She teaches filmmaking at Northwestern University and lives in New York and Chicago.

JORDAN KISNER
has published essays in
n+1
,
New York Magazine
,
The American Scholar
, and elsewhere, and she is at work on a book inspired by “Thin Places.” She holds an MFA in nonfiction from Columbia University, where she teaches undergraduate writing.

AMITAVA KUMAR
is the author of several works of nonfiction, including
Lunch with a Bigot
,
A Matter of Rats
, and
A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb
. He teaches English at Vassar College and is currently writing a book about academic style with the support of a Guggenheim fellowship.

RICHARD M. LANGE
’s short fiction has appeared in
North American Review
,
Cimarron Review
,
Mississippi Review
,
Ping Pong
,
Chicago Quarterly Review
,
Eclipse
,
Georgetown Review
, and elsewhere, and two of his stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. A former copywriter for a major insurance company, he is working on a novel about the financial crisis. He lives in Santa Cruz, California.

LEE MARTIN
has published three memoirs:
From Our House
,
Turning Bones
, and
Such a Life
. He is also the author of four novels, including
The Bright Forever
, a finalist for the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, and, most recently,
Late One Night
. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in such places as
Harper’s Magazine
,
Ms.
,
Creative Nonfiction
,
The Sun
,
The Georgia Review
,
The Kenyon Review
,
Fourth Genre
,
River Teeth
,
The Southern Review
,
Prairie Schooner
,
Glimmer Train
, and
The Best American Mystery Stories
. He is the winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction and has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ohio Arts Council. He teaches in the MFA Program at The Ohio State University.

LISA NIKOLIDAKIS
’s fiction and nonfiction have appeared in
The Los Angeles Review
,
Brevity
,
McSweeney’s Internet Tendency
,
Passages North
,
Hunger Mountain
,
The Rumpus
,
The Greensboro Review
, and elsewhere. She has won an Orlando Prize from the A Room of Her Own Foundation for flash fiction and
The Briar Cliff Review
’s annual contest for nonfiction. She currently teaches creative writing in the Midwest, has just completed a collection of short stories, and is working on an essay collection.

JOYCE CAROL OATES
is the author of fiction, poetry, plays, and criticism. Her more than forty novels include
them
, which won the National Book Award in 1970,
Wonderland
,
You Must Remember This
,
We Were the Mulvaneys
,
The Gravedigger’s Daughter
, and, in 2016,
The Man Without a Shadow
. She has received the President’s Medal in the Humanities, a PEN Lifetime Achievement Award, and, most recently, the A. J. Liebling Award for Outstanding Boxing Writing. She teaches at Princeton University, New York University, and the University of California, Berkeley, and is a founding editor of
Ontario Review
.

MARSHA POMERANTZ
is the author of
The Illustrated Edge
, a book of poems (2011). A second manuscript has been a finalist for the National Poetry Series and for the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize but is still looking for a home. Her poems and essays have been published by
Beloit Poetry Journal
,
berfrois.com
,
Boston Review
,
Harvard Review
,
Parnassus
,
PN Review
,
Raritan
,
Salamander
, and others, and she has translated a novel, short stories, and poems from the Hebrew. She retired in 2013 as managing editor at the Harvard Art Museums.

JILL SISSON QUINN
’s essays have appeared in
Orion
,
Ecotone
,
OnEarth
, and many other magazines. She has received the Annie Dillard Award in Creative Nonfiction, a John Burroughs Essay Award, and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. Her essay “Sign Here if You Exist” was reprinted in
The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2011
. Her first book,
Deranged
, was published in 2010. A regular commentator for Wisconsin Public Radio’s
Wisconsin Life
series, she lives and writes in Scandinavia, Wisconsin.

JUSTIN PHILLIP REED
is a South Carolina native and the author of
A History of Flamboyance
(2016). His first full-length book of poetry,
Indecency
, is forthcoming in 2018. His work has appeared—or soon will—in
Boston Review
,
Callaloo
,
Catapult
,
Columbia Poetry Review
,
Eleven Eleven
,
The Kenyon Review
,
Obsidian
,
PEN American
,
The Rumpus
,
Vinyl
, and elsewhere. He received his MFA from Washington University in St. Louis and is the online editor for
Tusculum Review
.

Born in London in 1933,
OLIVER SACKS
was educated at The Queen’s College, Oxford. After receiving his medical degree, Sacks continued his studies in the United States, specializing in neurology and moving to New York City. His first book,
Migraine
(1970), combined an authoritative medical and historical coverage of the condition with the experiences of his suffering patients. Sacks would return again and again to case studies, turning them into a provocative literary form. They provide the basis for two of his best-known books,
Awakenings
(1973) and
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
(1985). He wrote two memoirs,
Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood
(2001) and
On the Move: A Life
, which was published shortly before he died in August 2015. “A General Feeling of Disorder” was one of his last essays.

KATHERINE E. STANDEFER
won the 2015 Iowa Review Award in Nonfiction. She writes about the body, consent, and medical technology from Tucson, where she teaches intimate creative writing classes that help people engage their experiences of sexuality and illness on the page. She earned her MFA in creative nonfiction at the University of Arizona. A certified sexologist, she also teaches in a pilot narrative medicine program at UA’s College of Medicine. Her work has appeared most recently in
Fourth Genre
,
The Iowa Review
,
Colorado Review
,
Indiana Review
,
Cutbank
,
Essay Daily
, and
High Country News
.

GEORGE STEINER
, the winner of numerous international awards and for many years a book critic at
The New Yorker
, is the author of many books, including
After Babel
,
Antigones
,
Language and Silence
,
Real Presences
, and
Extraterritorial
. His fiction includes
Proofs and Three Parables
and
The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H.
; he has also published two memoirs,
Errata: An Examined Life
and
My Unwritten Books
. A fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, since 1961, Steiner has taught at a number of universities and was a professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Geneva between 1974 and 1994.

MASON STOKES
is a professor of English at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York, where he teaches courses on African-American literature and queer fiction. He has published widely on race and sexuality in American culture and is also the author of
Saving Julian: A Novel
.

THOMAS CHATTERTON WILLIAMS
is the author of a memoir,
Losing My Cool
, and has written for
The New York Times
,
Harper’s Magazine
,
Smithsonian Journeys
,
London Review of Books
,
The New Yorker
, and many other publications. His next book, a reckoning with how we define race in America, will expand his essay “Black and Blue and Blond,” published last year in
The Virginia Quarterly Review
. He lives in Paris, where he is an associate editor at
Holiday
and
Purple Fashion Magazine
and a regular book critic for the
San Francisco Chronicle
.