ELIZABETH WINKLER is a journalist and book critic based in New York. Her essays, profiles, and reviews have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Times Literary Supplement, the Economist, the New Republic, and the Washington Post, among other places. She holds BA in English literature from Princeton University and an MA in English literature from Stanford University.
- p. 278, The Best American Essays 2020.
PHILIP WEINSTEIN, the Alexander Griswold Cummins Professor Emeritus at Swarthmore College, has published widely on nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction. The Society for the Study of Southern Literature chose his Becoming Faulkner (2010) for the C. Hugh Holman Award. "Soul-Error" is the signature essay in his current manuscript of the same title.
- p. 277, The Best American Essays 2020.
STEPHANIE POWELL WATTS won the Ernest J. Gaines Award for her short story collection We Are Taking Only What We Need. Her novel, No One Is Coming to Save Us, was the inaugural American Library Association selection by Sarah Jessica Parker and the winner of a 2018 NAACP Image Award.
- p. 277, The Best American Essays 2020.
JERALD WALKER's latest book, Magically Black and Other Essays, which includes "It's Hard Out Here for a Memoirist," was published in September 2024. He is also the author of two memoirs and the essay collection How to Make a Slave, a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award and winner of the 2020 Massachusetts Book Award. His work has appeared in publications such as Harvard Review, Creative Nonfiction, The Iowa Review, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Mother Jones, and it has been widely anthologized, including this sixth time in The Best American Essays. A recipient of a Pushcart Prize, the PEN/New England Award for Nonfiction, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Michener Foundation, Walker is a professor of creative writing at Emerson College.
- Contributors' Notes, The Best American Essays 2024.
Recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Michener Foundation, JERALD WALKER is a professor of creative writing at Emerson College. His essays have appeared in publications such as The Harvard Review, Mother Jones, The Iowa Review, The Missouri Review, Oxford American, and Creative Nonfiction, and he has been widely anthologized. He is the author of The World in Flames: A Black Boyhood in a White Supremacist Doomsday Cult; Street Shadows: A Memoir of Race, Rebellion, and Redemption, winner of the PEN/New England Award for Nonfiction, and How to Make a Slave and Other Essays, which includes "Breathe." This is his fifth appearance in the Best American Essays series.
- Contributors' Notes, The Best American Essays 2020.
DAVID L. ULIN is the author or editor of a dozen books, including Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles, shortlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, and Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology, which won a California Book Award. The former book editor and book critic of the Los Angeles Times, he has written for The Atlantic, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Paris Review, and the New York Times, among other publications. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and Lannan Foundation and teaches at the University of Southern California. Most recently he edited the Library of America's Joan Didion: The 1960's & 70s, the first in a three-volume edition of the author's collected works.
- p. 277, The Best American Essays 2020.
ALISON TOWNSEND is the author of The Persistence of Rivers: An Essay on Moving Water, Persephone in America, and The Blue Dress. Emerita professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, she lives in the farm country outside Madison, the inspiration for her essay collection, American Lady: A Natural History of My Search for Home (forthcoming in 2021).
- p. 276-7, The Best American Essays 2020.
MARK SUNDEEN is the author of five books, including The Unsettlers (2017), The Man Who Quit Money (2012), and The Making of Toro (2003). His work has been translated into seven languages and has appeared in the New York Times, Believer, McSweeney's, and many other publications. A contributing editor for Outside magazine, he has held the Russo Chair in Creative Writing at the University of New Mexico and teaches fiction and nonfiction at the Mountainview Low-Residency MFA Program. He lives with his wife and son in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
- p. 276, The Best American Essays 2020.
