Issue 396 | Contributors | The Sun Magazine

Contributors

December 2008

Writers

Ellen Bass’s poetry books include The Human Line (Copper Canyon Press) and Mules of Love (BOA Editions). She teaches in the low-residency MFA writing program at Pacific University.

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David Denny lives in Cupertino, California. When he isn’t teaching English at De Anza College, he can be found munching Good & Plenty in the balcony of the Stanford Theatre in Palo Alto or sitting in Peet’s Coffee and Tea shop writing poems, some of which have appeared in Atlanta Review, Iodine Poetry Journal, and California Quarterly. It’s a rather dull life, he says, but he likes it that way.

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David James Duncan is a father, a renowned fly fisherman, and a practitioner of what he calls “direct, small-scale compassion-activism.” He lives in Montana and is at work on a novel titled Eastern Western, which attempts to reconcile his western boots and Eastern books.

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Vivé Griffith lives in Austin, Texas, just five hundred feet from the so-called NAFTA superhighway. She directs the Free Minds Project, a free humanities course for low-income adults who haven’t been to college. “My students range in age from twenty-three to fifty-six,” she writes, “and they discuss Plato with gusto.”

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Grace Mattern is the author of the poetry chapbook Fever of Unknown Origin (Oyster River Press) and the executive director of the New Hampshire Coalition against Domestic and Sexual Violence. She lives in an old farmhouse in Northwood, New Hampshire, and does much of her writing on the wraparound porch, when it’s warm enough.

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Margaret McMullan teaches creative writing at the University of Evansville and divides her time between Evansville, Indiana, and Pass Christian, Mississippi. She’s the author of five novels, including the upcoming Cashay (Houghton Mifflin). She’s currently completing a collection of stories about Hurricane Katrina.

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Sy Safransky is editor and publisher of The Sun.

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Bethany Saltman is a writer and editor who lives in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York. She writes about religion, spirituality, and parenting for such magazines as Buddhadharma, Mothering, and Geez.

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Sparrow and his wife recently moved to Teaneck, New Jersey, into a house built in 1873. They have become “Victorian suburbanites,” he says. For more shenanigans from Sparrow’s recent presidential campaign, go to www.sparrowforprez.com.

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Thea Sullivan lives in San Francisco and spends most of her time chasing after her two-year-old son, who was born several months after the events described in her essay. She teaches writing, and at parties she likes to impress people by playing the William Tell Overture on her teeth.

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Photographers

Steven Ainsworth lives in Alexandria, Virginia, and works for the Environmental Protection Agency. Like Grandma Moses, he is embarking on a new career — photography — as he approaches his sixtieth birthday.

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Danielle Austen is a freelancer who lives in central New Jersey.

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Beau Brashares is a Wall Street professional who began taking photographs on the streets of New York City after 9/11 as a way of working through the trauma. He lives in Manhattan.

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Mark Chester is the former director of photography at the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP). He lives in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

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Sylvia de Swaan was the founding director of Sculpture Space in Utica, New York, and is currently a visiting instructor at Hamilton College.

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Anders Goldfarb’s work has been published in the Boston Globe, Witness, and Artforum. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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John Oliver Hodges lives in Oxford, Mississippi. “I have always had a weakness for anyone on the sidelines,” he says, “anybody who is being ignored.”

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Edis Jurčys was born in Lithuania, studied film in Russia, and worked for eight years at Moscow Network Television. Two books of his photographs have been published in Lithuania. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

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Jeff Pflueger has traveled in Syria and Lebanon to cover the Iraqi refugee crisis as a photojournalist. He lives in Berkeley, California.

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Melissa Shook lives in Chelsea, Massachusetts, and recently retired from teaching photography at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. “I’d like to have been a thoroughbred trainer,” she says, “but, alas, it’s too late.”

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Scott Stoughton is a carpenter and photographer living in Camden, Maine. His work has appeared in Shots.

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On The Cover

Anna Kaufman Moon took this month’s cover photo, of two street-corner Santas descending New York City subway steps, in 1964. She lives in Cobleskill, New York, and her work has appeared in Newsweek, LIFE, and the New York Times.

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image © Steven Ainsworth

Editor and Publisher
Sy Safransky

Managing Editor
Tim McKee

Senior Editor
Andrew Snee

Art Director
Robert Graham

Manuscript Editor
Colleen Donfield

Editorial Associates
Erica Berkeley
Rachel J. Elliott

Editorial Assistant
Luc Saunders

Proofreader
Seth Mirsky

Associate Publishers
Circulation & Marketing
Krista Bremer

Digital Media & Operations
Angela Winter

Director of Finance
Becky Gee

Circulation Assistant
Molly Herboth

Administrative Assistant
Angel Kropf

With Help From
Manuscript Reading
Marianne Erhardt
Dave Hart
Ann Humphreys
Paula Jolin
Gillian Kendall

Proofreading
Brent Winter

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