Issue 437 | Contributors | The Sun Magazine

Contributors

May 2012

Writers

Wendell Berry was born in 1934 in Henry County, Kentucky. A poet, novelist, essayist, farmer, conservationist, and philosopher, he has been called the “prophet of rural America.” Berry is a fierce critic of agribusines. In 1977 he resigned from his university post to focus on writing and farming near his birthplace, where he continues to live today.

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Rebekah Cowell is an investigative journalist whose work focuses on low-income, minority communities located near hazardous-waste facilities. She lives in Pittsboro, North Carolina, and is a fellow at the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University.

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SeSe Geddes teaches creative writing as well as belly dancing in Santa Cruz, California, where she worries that she has shirked her civic duty by never having learned to surf.

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Steve Kowit awarded himself the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006 at a private ceremony in his living room but declined to accept on political grounds. He teaches in the MFA program for writers at San Diego State University and lives in the hills of California near the Mexican border.

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Alison Luterman teaches writing through the Writing Salon in Berkeley, California. She has published two books of poetry and written two plays, for which she is seeking a producer. She lives in Oakland.

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Carolyn Miller grew up in the Missouri Ozarks and was baptized in the Roubidoux River at the age of eight. She now lives in San Francisco and is the author of the poetry books After Cocteau and Light, Moving.

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Linda McCullough Moore lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, and is chief cook and bottle washer at the Story Shoppe, her new mentoring and coaching service for aspiring writers. Her latest book is a collection of stories titled This Road Will Take Us Closer to the Moon.

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Sparrow lives in a double-wide trailer in Phoenicia, New York, where he can pick up French radio stations from Montreal at night. His most recent book is America: A Prophecy — The Sparrow Reader.

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Tarn Wilson’s commentaries have aired on public radio, and her writing has appeared in Gulf Stream and Inertia. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and can often be found on the trails of the Santa Cruz Mountains, diligently identifying flora and fauna with the help of a guidebook and then promptly forgetting them.

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Marion Winik’s most recent book is an essay collection called The Glen Rock Book of the Dead, and her column, “Bohemian Rhapsody,” appears at www.baltimorefishbowl.com. She has been raising kids for about half her life, which she considers to be the good half. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland.

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Photographers

Maureen Beitler has been a New York Foundation for the Arts fellow and a contributor to the annual documentary-photography exhibition Moving Walls. She lives in New York City.

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James Carroll’s photographs have been published in The New York Times Magazine and American Prospect. He lives in New York City.

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J. Moses Ceaser has done documentary photography for International Planned Parenthood, CARE, and Oxfam. He lives in Berkeley, California, where he runs a community cooking group called Frugal Foodies.

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Robert Curran earned a bachelor’s degree in visual arts, which he says sent him straight into the construction field. He lives in Bowling Green, Ohio, where he is a concrete finisher by day and an artist by night.

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Gina Kelly lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

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Frank Hamrick lives in Ruston, Louisiana, and teaches photography at Louisiana Tech University. His work is in the permanent collections of the Center for Creative Photography in Arizona and the Houston Center for Photography in Texas.

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Robert Hecht’s photographs have appeared in B&W and LensWork. He lives in San Rafael, California.

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Thomas Hyde owned a small community newspaper for a decade before selling it to pursue writing and photography. He lives with his wife on Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula.

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Brian H. Peterson’s photographs are in the collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Library of Congress. He lives in Lower Gwynedd, Pennsylvania.

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Carol Samour is the recipient of an Individual Artist Award from the Maryland State Arts Council, and her photographs have been published in Potomac Review, Kalliope, and Shots. She lives in Germantown, Maryland.

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Susan Shapiro is a photographer whose work has appeared on the covers of books from Random House; Farrar, Straus and Giroux; and HarperCollins. She lives in New York City.

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Kozo Takeuchi lives in Seattle, Washington.

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Santosh Verma’s photographs have been published in The New York Times, Bloomberg, and Time, and his corporate clients include Harley-Davidson and USAID. He lives in Mumbai, India.

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On The Cover

Jennifer Spelman lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and teaches photography in the U.S., Cuba, and India. She took this month’s cover photograph at a barber shop in Yazoo City, Mississippi, while traveling through the small towns of Mississippi and Louisiana in 2009.

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image © Robert Curran

Editor and Publisher
Sy Safransky

Managing Editor 
Tim McKee

Senior Editor
Andrew Snee

Art Director
Robert Graham

Digital-Media Director
David Mahaffey

Manuscript Editor
Colleen Donfield

Assistant Editor
Luc Saunders

Editorial AssociateS
Erica Berkeley
Rachel J. Elliott

Proofreader
Seth Mirsky

Associate Publisher
Krista Bremer

Director of Finance
Becky Gee

Circulation Assistant
Molly Herboth

Administrative Assistant
Holly McKinney

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

Proofreading
Lauren Holder Raab

Writing Retreats
Angela Winter

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