Issue 451 | Contributors | The Sun Magazine

Contributors

July 2013

Writers

Brian Doyle’s plan in life was to be a pro-basketball player for ten years and then the skipper of a small boat in the Pacific for the rest of his days. He has utterly failed to do either and is instead the editor of Portland Magazine at the University of Portland in Oregon. He did finally write a sea novel, The Plover, which will be published in March 2014.

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Ross Gay is the author of the poetry volumes Against Which and Bringing the Shovel Down and is an associate professor of creative writing at Indiana University Bloomington. He also works with the Bloomington Community Orchard, which is volunteer run and publicly owned. He is currently writing a book about African American farming.

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Jack Gilbert authored five books of poetry before his death in November 2012 at the age of eighty-seven. “All Jack ever wanted to know,” says poet Linda Gregg, with whom he lived for many years, “was that he was awake — that the trees in bloom were almond trees — and to walk down the road to get breakfast. He never cared if he was poor or had to sleep on a park bench.”

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Katti Gray is a journalist whose work has been published in The Washington Post, Newsday, Essence, and Ebony, and online at Salon.com. She divides her time between her beloved hometown of Little Rock, Arkansas, and Monticello, New York.

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Giorgios Mangakis was a criminal-law professor, attorney, and politician born in 1922 in Athens, Greece. When the Greek military regime collapsed in 1974, he returned from exile to Greece and took part in the new government. He was soon elected to the Greek parliament and continued to serve in several roles, including minister of justice, until the 1990s. He died in 2011 at the age of eighty-nine.

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Angelo Merendino is the last of eleven children and says he was fortunate to grow up in a house full of love. His photographs have been published in The New York Times and USA Today and on the websites of The Huffington Post, CNN, and The New Yorker. He lives in Cleveland, Ohio.

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Yehoshua November says, “Despite what many assume, my Hungarian ancestors didn’t acquire the name ‘November’ when they reached American shores. In Hungarian the month of November has the same spelling as the English version of the word. Why we had this name in Hungary, however, remains a mystery.” He is the author of God’s Optimism, which was named a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry. He teaches at Touro College and Rutgers University and lives in Teaneck, New Jersey, with his wife and children.

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Christian Zwahlen lives in Rochester, New York, where he teaches high-school English and plays ice hockey in the winter. He recently took his children on an owl prowl in the woods along Lake Ontario, where they spotted a saw-whet owl the size of a pop can in a white pine tree.

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Photographers

Chris Dougherty learned to take pictures from his father, a combat photographer in Vietnam. He lives in Seattle, Washington.

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Rachel J. Elliott works at The Sun and lives in Carrboro, North Carolina. Last month she made her first tintype in a photography workshop. To capture an image on the thin metal plate, she asked her eleven-year old daughter, Ava, to pose without moving for twenty-four seconds.

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Bill Emory lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, in the James River watershed. He has a regular photo column in his local newsweekly, The Hook.

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Pash Galbavy is a photographer, dancer, performance artist, and mask maker, as well as an assistant in her husband’s computer-consulting business. She lives in Sedona, Arizona.

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Lou Swenson’s love for photography began with the Kodak Pony 135 his mother gave him when he left for the Korean War. He lives in Dolores, a no-stoplight town in southwestern Colorado.

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Mark Townsend lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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Anita Vizireanu is originally from Romania and now lives in Athens, Ohio.

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Lloyd Wolf is the author of three books of photographs and the chief photographer for the Columbia Pike Documentary Project. He recently completed an assignment documenting Jewish social-service programs in Ukraine and Israel. He lives in Arlington, Virginia.

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On The Cover

Jerry Gay lives in Everett, Washington, and is the author of Seeing Reality. He took this month’s cover photograph in 1997. While driving through Texas, he saw a man sitting on his front porch and stopped to talk. The man said he was originally from Little Rock, Arkansas, was seventy-eight years old, and had picked cotton for most of his life.

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image © Bill Emory

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 Manager
Molly Herboth

Office Manager
Holly McKinney

With Help From
Manuscript Reading
Dave Hart
Paula Jolin
Gillian Kendall

Proofreading
Lauren Holder Raab

Writing Retreats
Angela Winter

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