Contents

January 13, 2005 • Volume 52, Number 1

LETTERS

Contributors

Sister Helen Prejean is a member of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Medaille and lives in Louisiana. She gives on average 140 lectures a year nationwide, seeking to encourage discussion of the death penalty. She is the author of Dead Man Walking. The article in this issue is adapted from her new book, The Death of Innocents: An Eyewitness Account of Wrongful Executions, to be published by Random House this month. (January 2005)

Colm Tóibín is the author of seven novels and two collections of stories. His play, The Testament of Mary, is now being staged at the Walter Kerr Theatre in New York City. He has been a visiting writer at Stanford, the University of Texas at Austin, and Princeton, and is now the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia.

Tim Judah has written widely on foreign affairs. He reports on the Balkans for The Economist and its online column Eastern Approaches. He is the author of books about the region and a biography of Abebe Bikila, the first black African to win a gold medal at the Olympics.
 (May 2012)

Jennifer Schuessler is an editor at The New York Times Book Review. (March 2011)

W.S. Merwin was born in New York City in 1927 and grew up in Union City, New Jersey, and in Scranton, Pennsylvania. From 1949 to 1951 he worked as a tutor in France, Portugal, and Majorca. He has since lived in many parts of the world, most recently on Maui in the Hawaiian Islands. He is the author of many books of poems, prose, and translations and has received both the Pulitzer and the Bollingen Prizes for poetry, among numerous other awards.

Charles Rosen is a pianist and music critic. In 2011 he was awarded a National Humanities Medal.

Henri Zerner, Professor of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard, is the author of Renaissance Art in France: The Invention of Classicism and Écrire l’histoire de l’art: Figures d’une discipline.

Pico Iyer is a Distinguished Presidential Fellow at Chapman University. He is the author of several books, including Video Night in Kathmandu, The Lady and the Monk, and The Global Soul. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and other publications and his most recent book is The Man Within My Head.

Jonathan Raban’s books include Surveillance, My Holy War, Arabia, Old Glory, Hunting Mister Heartbreak, Bad Land, Passage to Juneau, and Waxwings. He is the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Heinemann Award of the Royal Society of Literature, the PEN/West Creative Nonfiction Award, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers’ Award, and the Governor’s Award of the State of Washington. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, and The Independent. He lives in Seattle.

Aryeh Neier, former Executive Director of Human Rights Watch, is President of the Open Society Institute. He is the author of Taking Liberties: Four Decades in the Struggle for Rights.

James Fenton is a British poet and literary critic. From 1994 until 1999, Fenton was Oxford Professor of Poetry; in 2007 he was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry.

John R. Searle is Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. His most recent book is Making the Social World.
 (January 2013)

Robert Gottlieb’s Great Expectations: The Sons and Daughters of Charles Dickens will be published in November. (November 2012)

Daniel Mendelsohn’s reviews and essays on literary and cultural subjects appear frequently in The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker. He is the author, most recently, of the collection Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture, which was a finalist for the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award. His other books include two memoirs, a translation of the complete works of C.P. Cavafy, and a study of Greek tragedy, Gender and the City in Euripides’ Political Plays. He teaches at Bard College.

Joyce Carol Oates is Visiting Professor in the English Department at the University of California at Berkeley. Her new novel is Daddy Love.


Stephen Kotkin directs Russian studies at Princeton. He received a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1988 under Martin Malia and Reginald Zelnik, both of whom died this year. (January 2005)

Mark Danner is the author, most recently, of Stripping Bare the Body: Politics Violence War. He is Chancellor’s Professor of English, Journalism and Politics at the University of California at Berkeley and James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs, Politics and the Humanities at Bard College and is currently teaching at Al Quds University in East Jerusalem. His book Torture and the Forever War will be published in the spring of 2013. His writing and other work can be found at markdanner.com.