Spring 2014

Lawrence Weschler, a contributing editor to VQR, is the former director of the New York Institute for the Humanities and artistic director emeritus of the Chicago Humanities Festival. His books include Uncanny Valley: Adventures in the Narrative (Counterpoint, 2011) and Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences (McSweeney’s, 2006), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. He is the author of a set of paired biographies of Robert Irwin (the revised edition of Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees) and David Hockney (True to Life), both released in 2009 from the University of California Press.

Leslie Jamison is a VQR editor at large and the author of five books: The Gin Closet (Free Press, 2011); The Empathy Exams (Graywolf, 2014); The Recovering (Little, Brown, 2018); Make It Scream, Make It Burn (Little, Brown, 2019); and most recently the memoir Splinters (Little, Brown, 2024). She teaches at Columbia University.

Rita Dove is a former US Poet Laureate (1993–1995) and recipient of the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for her book Thomas and Beulah (Carnegie Mellon, 1986). Her most recent poetry collections are Playlist for the Apocalypse (Norton, 2021); Collected Poems: 1974-2004 (Norton, 2016); Sonata Mulattica (Norton, 2009); and American Smooth (Norton, 2004). Dove is the sole editor of The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry (2011). Her other honors include the 2011 National Medal of Arts. She is the Henry Hoyns Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Virginia.