The Best American Essays 2015 (35 page)

I tried so hard.

HILTON ALS
is a staff writer at
The New Yorker
and also contributes to
The
New York Review of Books.
He is the author of
The Women
and
White Girls.

ROGER ANGELL
, a senior editor and a staff writer, has contributed to
The New Yorker
since 1944 and became a fiction editor in 1956. His writing has appeared in many anthologies, including
The Best American Sports Writing, The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Essays
, and
The Best American Magazine Writing.
His nine books include
The Stone Arbor and Other Stories, A Day in the Life of Roger Angell
, and, most recently,
Let Me Finish.
His baseball books include
The Summer Game, Five Seasons, Late Innings, Season Ticket, Once More Around the Park, A Pitcher's Story
, and
Game Time.
He has won a number of awards for his writing, including a George Polk Award for Commentary, a Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement, and the Michael Braude Award for Light Verse, presented by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2011 he was the inaugural winner of the PEN/ESPN Lifetime Achievement Award for Literary Sports Writing. In 2014, Angell received the J. G. Taylor Spink Award, the highest honor given to writers by the Baseball Hall of Fame. In 2015 he won the National Magazine Award for Essays and Criticism for “This Old Man.”

KENDRA ATLEEWORK
grew up in the eastern Sierra Nevada mountains and is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Minnesota. Her nonfiction won the AWP Intro Journals Award in 2014, and her essays can be found in
Hayden's Ferry Review
,
The Pinch Journal
,
The Morning News
, and
Guernica.
“Charade” is her first publication. She is at work on a book of nonfiction about drought and wildfire in her brazen home state of California.

ISAIAH BERLIN
was born in Riga, now the capital of Latvia, in 1909. When he was six, his family moved to Russia; there, in 1917, in Petrograd, he witnessed both revolutions—Social Democratic and Bolshevik. In 1921 he and his parents went to England, and he was educated at St. Paul's School, London, and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. At Oxford he was a Fellow of All Souls, a Fellow of New College, professor of social and political theory, and founding president of Wolfson College. He also held the presidency of the British Academy. His main published works are
Karl Marx
,
Russian Thinkers
,
Concepts and Categories
,
Against the Current
,
Personal Impressions
,
The Crooked Timber of Humanity
,
The Sense of Reality
,
The Proper Study of Mankind
,
The Roots of Romanticism
,
The Power of Ideas
,
Three Critics of the Enlightenment, Freedom and Its Betrayal
,
Liberty
,
The Soviet Mind
,
Political Ideas in the Romantic Age
, and four volumes of letters, the final volume of which,
Affirming: Letters 1975–1997
, was published in 2015. As an exponent of the history of ideas he was awarded the Erasmus, Lippincott, and Agnelli Prizes; he also received the Jerusalem Prize for his lifelong defense of civil liberties. He died in 1997.

SVEN BIRKERTS'S
most recent book,
Changing the Subject: Art and Attention in the Internet Age
, has just been published. He is director of the Bennington Writing Seminars and editor of
AGNI
, based at Boston University. He lives in Arlington, Massachusetts.

TIFFANY BRIERE
has received awards from the Rona Jaffe Foundation and Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. She holds a PhD in genetics from Yale University and an MFA in fiction from Bennington College. Her work has appeared in
Tin House.

JUSTIN CRONIN
is the author of the internationally best-selling novels of the Passage Saga (
The Passage, The Twelve
, and
The City of Mirrors
), which have been translated into over forty languages. His other work includes the novels
Mary and O'Neil
, winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award and the Stephen Crane Prize, and
The Summer Guest.
A Distinguished Faculty Fellow in the Humanities at Rice University, he divides his time between Houston, Texas, and Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

MEGHAN DAUM
is the author of four books, including the essay collections
My Misspent Youth
and
The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion.
She is also the editor of
Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids.
Daum has been an opinion columnist at the
Los Angeles Times
since 2005 and has written for numerous magazines, including
The New Yorker
, the
New York Times
Magazine
,
Harper's Magazine
, and
Vogue.
A recipient of a 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship, she is an adjunct associate professor in the MFA Writing Program at Columbia University's School of the Arts and has taught at the Aspen Institute's Summer Words festival, the Nebraska Writers' Conference, and CalArts.

ANTHONY DOERR'S
most recent book is the novel
All the Light We Cannot See
, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. His short fiction has appeared in
The Best American Short Stories
, the
O. Henry Prize Stories
,
New American Stories
, and
The
Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Fiction.
Doerr lives in Boise, Idaho, with his wife and sons.

MALCOLM GLADWELL
is a staff writer for
The New Yorker
and the author, most recently, of
David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants.

MARK JACOBSON
is a longtime journalist. He has written for a wide variety of magazines over the past forty years, during which time he has been employed by
New York
magazine,
Rolling Stone, Esquire
, the
Village Voice, National Geographic
, and many others. His magazine work served as the basis for the film
American Gangster
and the TV show
Taxi.
His most recent book is
The Lampshade
, the story of a strange and unsettling object found in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. He was born and continues to live in New York City.

MARGO JEFFERSON
is a Pulitzer Prize–winning critic and the author of
Negroland: A Memoi
r and
On Michael Jackson.
She has been a staff writer for the
New York Times
and
Newsweek
and has published in
The Believer
,
Bookforum
,
New York
magazine,
The Nation
, the
Washington Post
,
Gigantic
,
Grand Street
, and elsewhere. Her essays have been anthologized in
The Inevitable: Contemporary Writers Confront Death
,
The Best African-American Essays
,
The Mrs. Dalloway Reader
,
The Jazz Cadence of American Culture
,
Black Cool
, and
What My Mother Gave Me.
She teaches in the writing program at Columbia University.

PHILIP KENNICOTT
is the art and architecture critic of the
Washington Post
and the winner of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for criticism. He was a finalist for the Pulitzer for criticism in 2012 and for editorial writing in 2000, as well as a National Magazine Award finalist in 2015 in the Essays and Criticism category. He was nominated for a 2006 Emmy Award and won the CINE Golden Eagle for video work exploring the role of oil money in the politics of Azerbaijan. He is a former contributing editor at the
New Republic
, a regular reviewer for
Gramophone
, and a frequent contributor to
Opera News.

TIM KREIDER'S
first collection of essays was
We Learn Nothing
(2012). His second collection,
I Wrote This Book Because I Love You
, is due out in 2015. He is a frequent contributor to the
New York Times
and
Men's Journal
, among other publications. He was also a cartoonist for the
Baltimore
City Paper
from 1997 to 2009. His cartoons are collected in three books:
The Pain—When Will It End?
,
Why Do They Kill Me?
, and
Twilight of the Assholes.

KATE LEBO
is the author of two cookbooks,
Pie School: Lessons in Fruit, Flour, and Butter
and
A Commonplace Book of Pie.
Her essays and poems have appeared in
New England Review
,
Best New Poets
,
Gastronomica
,
Willow Springs
,
The Rumpus
,
Los Angeles Review
, and other publications. She lives in Spokane, Washington, and teaches poetry and food-writing workshops nationally.

JOHN REED
is the author of the novels
A Still Small Voice
(2000),
The Whole
(2005), and the SPD bestseller
Snowball's Chance
(2002);
All The World's A Grave: A New Play by William Shakespeare
(2008); and
Tales of Woe
(2010). He holds an MFA from Columbia University. His writing and multimedia have appeared in
Intercourse
, the
Brooklyn Rail, Paper Magazine, Artforum, Bomb Magazine, Playboy, Out Magazine, Art in America
, the PEN Poetry Series, the
Los Angeles Times, The Paris Review, The Believer, The Rumpus, The Daily Beast, Gawker, Slate
, the
Wall Street Journal
, and
ElectricLit
, among others, and he is a frequent contributor to
Vice.
His works have been translated into German, French, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and Korean. He currently teaches at the New School and the New York Arts Program. See
JohnReed.org
.

ASHRAF H. A. RUSHDY
is the Benjamin Waite Professor at Wesleyan University and teaches in the African American Studies Program and the English Department. He is also the university's academic secretary. He is the author of
The Empty Garden
(1992),
Neo-Slave Narratives
(1999),
Remembering Generations
(2001),
American Lynching
(2012),
The End of American Lynching
(2012), and
The Guilted Age: Apologies for the Past
(2015).

DAVID SEDARIS
is the author of the books
Barrel Fever, Naked, Holidays on Ice, Me Talk Pretty One Day, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, When You Are Engulfed in Flames
, and
Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary.
He is a regular contributor to
The New Yorker
, National Public Radio's
This American Life
, and the BBC. His most recent essay collection is
Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls.

ZADIE SMITH
was born in northwest London in 1975 and divides her time between London and New York. Her first novel,
White Teeth
, was the winner of the Whitbread First Novel Award, the Guardian First Book Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction, and the Commonwealth Writers' First Book Award. Her second novel,
The Autograph Man
, won the Jewish Quarterly Wingate Literary Prize. Zadie Smith's third novel,
On Beauty
, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Commonwealth Writers' Best Book Award (Eurasia Section) and the Orange Prize for Fiction. Her most recent novel,
NW
, was published in 2012 and has been shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and the Women's Prize for Fiction.

Writer, historian, and activist
REBECCA SOLNIT
is the author of eighteen books about environment, landscape, community, art, politics, hope, and feminism, including two atlases, of San Francisco in 2010 and New Orleans in 2013,
Men Explain Things to Me, The Faraway Nearby, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Wanderlust: A History of Walking
, and
River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West
(for which she received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, and the Lannan Literary Award). A product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, she is a columnist for
Harper's Magazine.

CHERYL STRAYED
is the author of
Wild, Torch
, and
Tiny Beautiful Things.
Her books have been translated into more than thirty languages around the world. Her essays have been published in
The
New York Times Magazine, Vogue, Salon
, and elsewhere and have been selected for inclusion in
The Best American Essays
three times. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

KELLY SUNDBERG'S
essays have appeared in
Guernica, Slice, Denver Quarterly, Mid-American Review, The Los Angeles Review, Quarterly West
, and elsewhere. She is a PhD candidate in creative nonfiction at Ohio University, where she is the managing editor of
Brevity
magazine, and she was recently named the 2015 A Room of Her Own Foundation's Courage Fellow.