McSweeney's Issue 57 (McSweeney's Quarterly Concern)

Hanif Abdurraqib is a writer from the east side of Columbus, Ohio. Brittany K. Allen is a Brooklyn-based writer and performer. Her prose has been published on/in The Kenyon Review, Longreads, Catapult, and elsewhere, and her short fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Habitual covens include the Sewanee Writers Conference (where she works on staff), Ensemble Studio Theatre, and the emerging writers group at the Public Theatre. Mari Andrew is a writer and artist who posts daily-ish illustrations on Instagram. David Autor is Ford Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts of Technology. His research studies the labor-market impacts of technological change and globalization. Autor was recently christened "Twerpy MIT Economist" by John Oliver of Last Week Tonight during a segment on automation and employment. He is currently figuring out how to merchandise this moniker. Mona Awad is the author of the novels Bunny (Viking, June 2019) and 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl (Penguin, 2016), which won the Amazon Best First Novel Award and was a finalist for the Scotia Bank Giller Prize. She holds an MFA in Fiction from Brown University and a PhD in Creative Writing and English from the University of Denver. Alison Bechdel is the author of the graphic memoirs Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, and Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama. For twenty-five years, she wrote and drew the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For. Ken Burns has been making documentary films for over forty years. Since the Academy Award nominated Brooklyn Bridge in 1981, Ken has gone on to direct and produce some of the most acclaimed historical documentaries ever made, including The Civil War; Baseball; Jazz; Mark Twain; Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson; The War; The National Parks: America's Best Idea; The Roosevelts: An Intimate History; Jackie Robinson; and The Vietnam War. His newest film Country Music premieres in September on PBS. Ken's films have been honored with dozens of major awards, including sixteen Emmy Awards, two Grammy Awards and two Oscar nominations; and in September of 2008, at the News & Documentary Emmy Awards, Ken was honored by the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences with a Lifetime Achievement Award. Elizabeth Catte is a writer and historian based in Staunton, Virginia. She is the author of What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia and the forthcoming Pure America. Adrienne Celt is the author of the novels Invitation to a Bonfire and The Daughters, which won the 2015 PEN Southwest Book Award, as well as a collection of comics, Apocalypse How? An Existential Bestiary. Her work has appeared in the 2016 O. Henry Prize Stories, Esquire, Zyzzyva, Prairie Schooner, The Paris Review Daily, Strange Horizons, and many other places. She lives in Tucson, Arizona. Nikki Darling is an artist and writer living in Los Angeles. Her debut novel Fade Into You was published last November on Feminist Press. Her works and letters are archived in the UCLA Chicano Studies Department. Katrina Dodson is the translator of The Complete Stories, by Clarice Lispector, winner of the 2016 PEN Translation Prize and other awards. She is currently adapting her Lispector translation journal into a book and translating the 1928 Brazilian modernist classic, Macunaima, the Hero Without Character, by Mario de Andrade (New Directions). Her writing has appeared in The Believer, McSweeney's, Guernica, and elsewhere. Dodson holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley, and has been a fellow of the Fulbright Program, National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell Colony, and Banff Centre. She teaches translation at Columbia University. George Edema is a husband of one, father of three, occasional writer and artist, teacher of the Holy Bible, graduate of Auburn University and Covenant Theological Seminary, vintage baseball card enthusiast. Known to wander off at times. Brian Evenson is the author of over a dozen works of fiction, most recently the story collection Song for the Unraveling of the World. He lives in Los Angeles and teaches at CalArts. Karen Gu's fiction has appeared in Paper Darts and The Margins. She has been awarded fellowships from Kundiman, the Jack Jones Literary Arts Retreat, and the Loft Literary Center. She recently moved to Las Vegas to pursue her MFA at UNLV and is working on a story collection. Nick Hornby is an Oscar-nominated screenwriter and award-winning author. His books include Funny Girl, Juliet Naked, A Long Way Down, How to be Good, About A Boy, High Fidelity, 31 Songs, and Fever Pitch. He wrote the screenplays for the films Brooklyn, Wild, and An Education, the TV series Love, Nina and, most recently, State of the Union. Morgan Jerkins is the author of the New York Times bestseller, This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America. Jim Koebel is an attorney based in North Carolina. Mimi Lok is the author of the story collection Last of Her Name, published October 2019 by Kaya Press. She is the recipient of a Smithsonian Ingenuity Award and an Ylvisaker Award for Fiction, and her work has been published or is forthcoming in Electric Literature, Nimrod, Lucky Peach, and elsewhere. Mimi is also the executive director and editor of Voice of Witness, a human rights/oral history nonprofit she cofounded that amplifies marginalized voices through a book series and a national education program. Ally Maki is a Japanese-American actress known for her roles in Toy Story 4, Cloak and Dagger, and Wrecked. She is also the founder and creative director of Asian American Girl Club, an apparel company redefining what it means to be a modern Asian American woman. Clare Malone is a senior political writer at FiveThirtyEight.com where she covers the 2020 presidential election and appears on the weekly FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast. Her writing has also appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Harper's, and Elle. Nicholas Mancusi's writing has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, Time, Joyland, and many other publications. In June of 2019, Hanover Square Press published his debut novel, A Philosophy of Ruin. He lives in Brooklyn. Robert McRuer is Professor of English at The George Washington University, where he teaches queer theory, disability studies, and American literature. He is the author of Crip Times: Disability, Globalization, and Resistance (NYU Press, 2018) and Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability (NYU Press, 2006). Matthew Milia is the lead singer and songwriter for Frontier Ruckus. He lives in Detroit and recently released his debut solo album, Alone at St. Hugo. Lorrie Moore Tucker Nichols is an artist whose work has been exhibited around the world. He has co-authored two children's books: Crabtree (with Jon Nichols) and This Bridge Will Not Be Gray (with Dave Eggers). He lives in northern California. Peter Orner is the author of six books, including Am I Alone Here? a Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His latest, Maggie Brown & Others is recently out from Little, Brown. He teaches at Dartmouth College. Elena Passarello is the author of two essay collections, Let Me Clear My Throat and Animals Strike Curious Poses. Her work has appeared in publications including the New York Times, Oxford American, and The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2018. A recipient of the Whiting Award, she teaches at Oregon State University. Mike Sacks has written eight books and for various publications. He lives in New York. Jerry Saltz is senior art critic at New York magazine. Elissa Schappell is the author of two books of fiction, Blueprints for Building Better Girls, and Use Me, a runner up for the PEN Hemingway Award. She is also a journalist, essayist, and book reviewer, as well as a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, and a founding-editor of Tin House. Elizabeth Stix's stories have appeared in McSweeney's, Tin House, The Southampton Review, the Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine, and Best Microfiction 2019. Her short story "Alice" won the Bay Guardian Fiction Contest and was optioned by Sneaky Little Sister Films. She is finishing a novel-in-stories called Things I Want Back from You. Jonny Sun (stylized as "jomny sun") is the author and illustrator of everyone's a aliebn when ur a aliebn too and the illustrator of the New York Times Bestseller Gmorning, Gnight! by Lin-Manuel Miranda. He is a writer on the sixth season of BoJack Horseman and a doctoral candidate at MIT. He previously studied as an architect (M.Arch., Yale) and engineer (B.A.Sc., University of Toronto). Avery Trufelman is a producer for the design podcast 99% Invisible and the host of Articles of Interest, a series about fashion. Jeff Tweedy is a founding member and leader of the American rock band Wilco, and before that the cofounder of the alt-country band Uncle Tupelo. He is one of contemporary American music's most accomplished songwriters, musicians, and performers. Most recently he has released two solo albums, Warm and Warmer, and his New York Times' Bestseller memoir, Let's Go (So We Can Get Back). Deb Olin Unferth is the author of five books. The sixth, Barn 8, will appear in 2020. Shelly Oria is the author of New York 1, Tel Aviv 0 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), and of the collaborative digital novella Clean, commissioned by WeTransfer and McSweeney's, which received two Lovie Awards from the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences. Her fiction has appeared in The Paris Review and elsewhere; has been translated to other languages; and has won a number of awards. Oria is the editor of Indelible in the Hippocampus, an upcoming anthology of #MeToo fiction, nonfiction, and poetry (McSweeney's 2019). David Wallace-Wells is deputy editor at New York magazine, and author of The Uninhabitable Earth. Rick Wilson is the author of Everything Trump Touches Dies and a former Republican ad maker and political strategist.