The Oxford American Book of Great Music Writing

Contributors

Daniel Alarcón is an associate editor of Etiqueta Negra, an award-winning
monthly magazine based in his native Lima, Peru. He is the author of the story
collection War by Candlelight, which was a finalist for the 2006 PEN/Hemingway
Foundation Award, and the novel Lost City Radio, published in 2007. He was named
one of Granta magazine’s Best Young American Novelists.

Don Asher started playing jazz piano professionally at age fifteen in the dives
and roadhouses of Central Massachusetts. In the early ’60s, he was house pianist
at the hungry i nightclub in San Francisco where he worked with such up-andcoming
artists as Barbra Streisand, Woody Allen, Lenny Bruce, Bill Cosby, and
Bob Newhart. Asher is the author of six novels. His nonfiction includes Raise Up
Off Me and Notes From a Battered Grand.His short work has appeared in Harper’s,
The Paris Review, the Washington Post, and San Francisco Magazine, among others.

Chris Bachelder is the author of the novels U.S.!, Bear v. Shark, and Lessons in
Virtual Tour Photography (an e-book). His stories and essays have appeared in
Harper’s, The Believer, The Oxford American,New Stories From the South, and elsewhere.
He has an MFA in fiction writing from the University of Florida and is an
assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He has also
taught at Colorado College and New Mexico State University.

Mark Binelli is the author of the novel Sacco and Vanzetti Must Die! and a contributing
editor at Rolling Stone. He lives in Manhattan.

Sven Birkerts is the author of eight books, including his memoir, My Sky Blue
Trades, and the recent The Art of Time in Memoir.He edits the literary journal AGNI
at Boston University and was recently named director of the Bennington Writing
Seminars. His musical tastes run to folk and blues and he has played guitar at “the
lowest-rank amateur” level for decades. He has also written about Lucinda
Williams and Lightnin’ Hopkins for The Oxford American.

Roy Blount, Jr., is the author of twenty-one books, most recently Alphabet Juice.
Others include Long Time Leaving: Dispatches From Up South, which includes the
“Gone Off Up North” columns he has been writing for The Oxford American since
1996; Feet on the Street: Rambles Around New Orleans; Robert E. Lee, a biography; Be
Sweet, a memoir; and Roy Blount’s Book of Southern Humor, an anthology which he
edited. He is a panelist on NPR’s Wait, Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me!, a charter member of
the Rock Bottom Remainders (a rock & roll band of authors), and a member of
the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He has written profiles of Willie Nelson, Jerry
Jeff Walker, and Loretta and Tammy and Dolly; performed songs of his own devising
on A Prairie Home Companion; spoken out about the plight of the singing
impaired; and collected 2,462 different songs about food.

Will Blythe grew up in North Carolina, lives in New York, and is the author of To
Hate Like This Is To Be Happy Forever.He is also a frequent contributor to the New
York Times Book Review.

In college, William Bowers fronted the Charleston, South Carolina, band
Cluppy, which self-released its discs on the same day as Will Oldham’s new works
so they could take pictures of their albums sitting beside his at the shops. One
reviewer observed that Bowers’s vocals “strained the colander of aural bearability,”
so he became a music typist for the local free alt-weekly, from which he graduated
to The Oxford American, Magnet, No Depression, Paste, the Village Voice, and
Pitchfork.His poetry, fiction, essays, and book reviews have been published in The
Wallace Stevens Journal,Open City, Esquire, and People, among others.

Wendy Brenneris the author of two books: Phone Calls From the Dead and Large
Animals in Everyday Life, which won the Flannery O’Connor Award. She is the
recipient of an NEA fellowship, Henfield Award, North Carolina Arts Council fellowship,
and the AWP Intro Award for her short fiction. Her stories and essays
have appeared in Seventeen, Allure, Travel & Leisure, Story, Mississippi Review, New
England Review, and other magazines, and have been anthologized in The Best
American Magazine Writing and New Stories From the South. She is a contributing
writer for The Oxford American and teaches in the MFA program in creative writing
at University of North Carolina Wilmington.

Kevin Brockmeier is the author of the novels The Brief History of the Dead and
The Truth About Celia, the story collections Things That Fall From the Sky and The
View From the Seventh Layer, and the children’s novels City of Names and Grooves:
A Kind of Mystery. He was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship and, in 2007, was
named one of Granta magazine’s Best Young American Novelists. Other than Iris
DeMent’s My Life, his favorite albums are Astral Weeks by Van Morrison and Melody
Mountain by Susanna and the Magical Orchestra. He lives in Little Rock, Arkansas,
where he was raised.

Ron Carlson is the author of nine books of fiction, most recently the novel Five
Skies, which was selected by the Los Angeles Times as one of their favorite books of
2007. His new book on writing fiction, Ron Carlson Writes a Story, was also published
in 2007. His stories have appeared in Esquire, Harper’s, The New Yorker, GQ,
Epoch, The Oxford American, and others, as well as The Best American Short Stories,
The O. Henry Prize Series, The Pushcart Prize anthology, and The Norton Anthology
of Short Fiction, and dozens of other anthologies. A graduate of the University of
Utah, Carlson is the director of the graduate program in fiction at the University
of California, Irvine.

Rosanne Cash is a Grammy Award–winning singer and songwriter. Her fourteen
albums, released over the last twenty-seven years, have charted eleven Number One
singles. Her most recent album, Black Cadillac, was released in January 2006 and
received a Grammy nomination for Best Contemporary Folk/Americana Album.
Cash is the author of a book of stories (for adults), Bodies of Water, and the children’s
book Penelope Jane: A Fairy’s Tale. Her essays and fiction have appeared in the New
York Times, Rolling Stone, The Oxford American, New York Magazine, and other periodicals
and collections. Cash lives in New York City with her husband, John
Leventhal, and her children. She is signed to Manhattan Records and is currently
working on her debut CD for the EMI-based label, as well as a book of nonfiction, to
be published in 2008.

Billy Collins is the author of nine collections of poetry, including his most recent
book, Ballistics. He served as United States Poet Laureate (2001–2003) and as New
York State Poet Laureate (2004–2006).

It is safe to call R. Crumb the father of underground comix. His creations include
ZAP, Despair, Big Ass, Motor City Comics, Mr. Natural, Fritz the Cat, The People’s
Comics, among many others. His books include The Complete Crumb Comics,
Crumb Sketchbook Vol. 10, and Your Vigor for Life Appalls Me, a collection of his personal
letters. He lives in France with his wife, Aline.

Lee Durkee was born in Hawaii, raised in South Mississippi, and now lives in
Montpelier, Vermont. He has published stories in Harper’s, Zoetrope: All-Story,
and Tin House, and is the author of the novel Rides of the Midway.He is currently
finishing up a play, a Shakespearian remix of the rap virtuoso Nas, Ill Will: Hamlet
Post’pocalypsed (a.k.a. KILL ALL VAMPIRES!).

John T. Edge, a contributing editor at Gourmet, is a columnist for US Airways
Magazine, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and The Oxford American.His work for
Saveur and other magazines has been featured in every edition of the Best Food
Writing compilation since 2001. His books include the James Beard Award–-
nominated cookbook, A Gracious Plenty: Recipes and Recollections from the American
South, and Southern Belly: The Ultimate Food Lover’s Companion to the South.He has
also published a four-book series with Putnam on iconic American eats (Fried
Chicken, Apple Pie, Hamburgers & Fries, and Donuts).

Beth Ann Fennelly received a 2003 NEA Award and a 2006 United States Artists
Grant. She’s published three books of poetry: Open House, which won the 2001
Kenyon Review Prize and the GLCA New Writers Award, Tender Hooks, and
Unmentionables. She has three times been included in The Best American Poetry
series and is a Pushcart Prize winner. Her book of essays, Great With Child, was
published in 2006.

Carol Ann Fitzgerald is the managing editor of The Oxford American.Her fiction
and nonfiction have appeared in Ploughshares, The Gettysburg Review, The
Oxford American, and other publications.

David Gates is the author of the novels Jernigan and Preston Falls and the collection
of short stories The Wonders of the Invisible World.

William Gay is the author of three novels and a collection of short stories, I Hate
to See That Evening Sun Go Down.His novel Twilight was published in winter 2006.
His fiction and essays have appeared in various magazines. He lives in rural
Tennessee, where he is at work on a novel.

Robert Gordon is the author of five books and six films. Most recently, he was
producer and director of Respect Yourself: The Stax Records Story.His other films
include William Eggleston’s Stranded in Canton and Shakespeare Was a Big George
Jones Fan: Cowboy Jack Clement’s Home Movies. His books include It Came From
Memphis and Can’t Be Satisfied: The Life and Times of Muddy Waters.His writing has
earned him a Grammy nomination and, for a piece on Jeff Buckley that originally
appeared in The Oxford American, an ASCAP Deems Taylor Award.

Tom Graves, a lifelong Memphian, is the former editor of the critically acclaimed
Rock & Roll Disc magazine and now teaches English and creative writing at
LeMoyne-Owen College in Memphis. He is the author of the biography Crossroads:
The Life and Afterlife of Blues Legend Robert Johnson. He’s written about music for
Rolling Stone, Musician, the New York Times Book Review, Washington Post Book
World, American History, and The New Leader. In 2003, he sold his beloved Les Paul
guitar to a collector from Perth, Australia, to finance a trip to Dakar, Senegal, where
he met his wife, Bintou.

Peter Guralnick is the author of the prize-winning, two-volume biography of Elvis
Presley, Last Train to Memphis and Careless Love. Over the years his work has argued
passionately and persuasively for the vitality of this country’s intertwined black and
white musical traditions, as well as for their integral place in mainstream culture.
His other books include Searching for Robert Johnson, Nighthawk Blues, an acclaimed
trilogy on American roots music: Sweet Soul Music, Lost Highway, and Feel Like Going
Home, and the recent biography Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke.

Jack Hitt is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s,and
the radio program This American Life. Most recently, his work can be found in Best
American Travel Writing and Best American Science Writing. Hitt won a Peabody
Award in 2006 for the radio program Habeas Schmabeas. He is currently at work
on a book about amateurs in America.

Bret Anthony Johnston is the editor of Naming the World: And Other Exercises
for the Creative Writer, and the author of Corpus Christi: Stories. He is the director
of creative writing at Harvard University.

Donald Justice (1925–2004) published fourteen volumes of poetry. His Selected
Poems was recognized with a Pulitzer Prize in 1980. He also received the Bollingen
Prize in 1991 and was a fellow and past chancellor of the Academy of American
Poets and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Justice was
on faculty at the University of Iowa, Syracuse University, and for ten years until
1992, the University of Florida in Gainesville. His last book was Collected Poems
(2004).

John Lewis is the arts and culture editor at Baltimore Magazine and a U.S. correspondent
for Vibrations, the French music magazine.

Steve Martin has starred in such films as Father of the Bride, Roxanne, Parenthood,
L.A. Story, Pennies From Heaven, and many others. He has also won Emmys for his
television writing and two Grammys for his comedy albums. In addition to his
bestselling novel, The Pleasure of My Company, and a collection of comic pieces,
Pure Drivel, he has written a play, Picasso at the Lapin Agile. His latest book is his
autobiography, Born Standing Up.He lives in California.

Robert Palmer (1945–1997), a musician, critic, and devotee of Dionysian ecstasy,
was born in Little Rock, Arkansas. As a horn player (clarinet, saxophone, flute),
he co-founded the seminal ’60s band the Insect Trust, and jammed with Ornette
Coleman, Bono, and the Rolling Stones. He cut his critical teeth writing for Rolling
Stone, then wrote for the New York Times from 1976–1988. Best remembered for
his book Deep Blues, Palmer also wrote Rock & Roll: An Unruly History, as well as
books on Jerry Lee Lewis, Lieber and Stoller, and a monograph on Memphis and
New Orleans music. He was equally at home rolling in the Delta dirt outside a juke
joint, playing with Sufi mystics in Morocco, and hanging out at the Dakota with
Yoko Ono. Blues & Chaos, an anthology of Palmer’s writing edited by Anthony
DeCurtis, will be published in 2009.

Michael Parker is the author of four novels and two collections of short fiction.
His fiction and nonfiction have appeared recently in the New York Times Magazine
and Runner’s World. He teaches in the MFA writing program at the University of
North Carolina Greensboro.

Michael Perry is a freelance writer and author of the memoirs Population 485:
Meeting Your Neighbors One Siren at a Time and Truck: A Love Story. He is also the
author of the essay collection Off Main Street: Barnstormers, Prophets & Gatemouth’s
Gator. Perry’s essays and articles have appeared in Esquire, the New York Times
Magazine, Outside, Backpacker, Orion, and Salon, and he is a contributing editor to
Men’s Health. He has written about music and musicians for publications ranging
from No Depression to Country Music Weekly, and plonks away in 4/4 time with his
band, The Long Beds. Perry lives in rural Wisconsin, where he remains active as
a volunteer emergency medical responder.

Tom Piazza is the author of nine books, including the novels City of Refuge and
My Cold War, and the short-story collection Blues and Trouble, which won the
James Michener Award. About his fiction, Bob Dylan wrote, “Tom Piazza’s writing
pulsates with nervous electrical tension—reveals the emotions that we can’t
define.” Also well-known as a music writer, Piazza won a 2004 Grammy Award
for his album notes to Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues: A Musical Journey, and he
is a three-time winner of the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for Music Writing. He
was The Oxford American’s “Southern Music” columnist from 1998–2001. His book
Why New Orleans Matters received the 2006 Humanities Book of the Year Award
from the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities. He lives in New Orleans.

Mike Powell was an editor and staff writer at Stylus online magazine for three
years. He has written for Pitchfork, the Village Voice, Paper Thin Walls, and a number
of other publications. He has also created several blogs.

Ron Rash is the author of three novels, three books of poetry, and three collections
of stories. His latest novel is Serena. He has won NEA fellowships in poetry
and fiction, an O. Henry Award, the James Still Award from the Fellowship of
Southern Writers, and is a 2008 PEN/Faulkner Award finalist. He grew up in
Boiling Springs, North Carolina, hometown of Earl Scruggs, and now teaches at
Western Carolina University.

P. Revess, also known as Michael Kupperman, is a cartoonist, illustrator, and
writer who lives in New York City. His work has appeared in places ranging from
The New Yorker to Saturday Night Live. He is currently working on an animated
project for television.

Paul Reyes is The Oxford American’s editor-at-large. His writing has appeared in
Details, Esquire, the Los Angeles Times Book Review, and Slate.

Mark Richard was born in Lake Charles, Louisiana, and grew up in Texas and
Virginia. He is the author of two award-winning short-story collections, The Ice
at the Bottom of the World and Charity; and the novel Fishboy. His journalism and
short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Esquire, GQ, The Paris
Review, Spin, Vogue, the New York Times, The Oxford American, and other publications.
He is the recipient of the PEN/Ernest Hemingway Award, an NEA fellowship,
a Whiting Writers’ Award, a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship,
the Mary Francis Hobson Medal for Arts and Letters, and a National Magazine
Award for Fiction.

John Fergus Ryan (1931–2003) was born in Shanghai, China, raised in Little Rock,
Arkansas, and spent his later years in Memphis, Tennessee. His work appeared in
The Atlantic Monthly, Penthouse, Esquire, The Oxford American, and Mayfair. He was
the author of two cult novels, The Redneck Bride and The Little Brothers of Saint
Mortimer.

Diane Roberts is a Florida native, educated at Florida State University and
Oxford, England. She has taught at Oxford University and the University of
Alabama, worked as a columnist and editorial board member at the St. Petersburg
Times, made radio documentaries for the BBC, recorded more than two hundred
commentaries for NPR, and written for the New York Times, the Times of London,
the Washington Post, and The Oxford American. Her books include Faulkner and
Southern Womanhood, The Myth of Aunt Jemima, and Dream State. In 2006, she got
thrown back into the briar patch of Tallahassee, Florida, and is now a professor
of creative writing at Florida State University.

Joe Saccois the cartoonist responsible for Palestine and Safe Area Gorazde, among
other works of comics journalism. He once made a living as a poster artist in
Berlin, chronicled in his widely panned book of music comics, But I Like It. His
favorite Beatle is George.

John Ryan Seawright (1956–2001) was a fiction writer and essayist who frequently
contributed to Flagpole in Athens, Georgia, where he was considered a
legend. He appeared in Inside Out, the 1987 documentary about the independentmusic
scene there.

Jeff Sharlet learned to love Al Green while living as an ambivalent member of a
fundamentalist sect in Arlington, Virginia, a story recounted in his book The
Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power. For Sharlet’s first
book, Killing the Buddha: A Heretic’s Bible, he learned to belt the Who’s “Baba
O’Riley” while living in the South Carolina compound of the Baba lovers, a sect
that reveres the late guru Meher Baba, for whom Pete Townshend wrote the song.
Sharlet is currently working on a history of “If I Had a Hammer,” which he learned
to sing from a first-grade music teacher who didn’t know it was written as a radical
anthem. He’s a contributing editor for Rolling Stone, where he does not write
about music, and Harper’s, from which his essay on the Dragons’ album Rock Like
Fuck was anthologized in Best Music Writing 2004.

Cynthia Shearer is the author of The Wonder Book of the Air, which won the 1997
Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for fiction, and The Celestial
Jukebox, a fictional exploration of the effects of African immigration on the dying
blues tradition in the Mississippi Delta. She was a recipient of an NEA fellowship
in fiction in 2000, and a Pushcart Prize for essays in 2006. She lives in Fort Worth,
Texas, and teaches writing at Texas Christian University.

A native of New Orleans, Sheryl St. Germain currently directs the MFA program
in creative writing at Chatham University in Pittsburgh. Her work has
received several awards, including two NEA fellowships, an NEH fellowship, the
Dobie Paisano fellowship, and the William Faulkner Award for the personal essay.
Her poetry books include Making Bread at Midnight, How Heavy the Breath of God,
and The Journals of Scheherazade. She has also published Je Suis Cadien, a book of
translations of the Cajun poet Jean Arceneaux, and a book of essays about grow-
ing up in New Orleans, Swamp Songs: The Making of an Unruly Woman. Her most
recent book is Let It Be a Dark Roux: New and Selected Poems.

Susan Straight has published six novels, including I Been in Sorrow’s Kitchen and
Licked Out All the Pots, Highwire Moon, and A Million Nightingales. Her short fiction
and essays have been published in O. Henry Prize Stories 2007, Best American Short
Stories 2003, McSweeney’s, Zoetrope: All-Story, Harper’s, the New York Times Magazine,
WEST, Salon, and The Oxford American, among others. She was born in Riverside,
where she still lives with her three daughters, and sees that ex-husband of hers nearly
every single day.

Marty Stuart is country music’s renaissance man. He is a singer/songwriter, a
musician, a producer, a writer of prose, and a photographer. He has scored six Top
Ten hits, one platinum album, five gold albums, four Grammy Awards, and a
Golden Globe nomination (for his film-score composition for All the Pretty
Horses). He has also written about music and culture for such publications as The
Oxford American, and his photographs have been exhibited in New Orleans and
Nashville. In his songwriting, singing, playing, and producing, there is a storyteller
at work—a man who listens to, and translates, the world he knows.

John Jeremiah Sullivan was born in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1974. He is a writerat-
large for GQ magazine, and his work has appeared in Harper’s, The Paris Review,
and The Oxford American.He is the winner of the 2003 National Magazine Award
for Best Feature and the 2003 Media Eclipse Award for Best Feature, and the
author of Blood Horses: Notes of a Sportswriter’s Son.

Joseph G. Tidwell III was born and raised in and around Jackson, Mississippi.
He is a self-taught writer of stage plays, movie scripts, novels, short stories, and
poetry, and his work has been produced in Hollywood and other places around
the country.

Nick Tosches is the author of the novel In the Hand of Dante, and many other
books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. In 2006, The Observer declared Hellfire,
his 1982 biography of Jerry Lee Lewis, the greatest music book ever written. His
piece for The Oxford American was a part of his last, longest, and deepest exploration
into the mysteries of American music. He is a contributing editor for Vanity
Fair and spends most of his time in New York City.

Anthony Walton is the author of Mississippi: An American Journey, and coeditor,
with Michael S. Harper, of The Vintage Book of African American Poetry. His
articles, essays, and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington
Post, Harper’s, and The Atlantic Monthly. His poems have been published in The
New Yorker, The Kenyon Review, The Oxford American, and Notre Dame Review,
among other magazines, and have been regularly anthologized. In 2005, he created,
wrote, and presented the long-form radio documentary Southern Road for
the BBC. He has taught at Notre Dame and Brown, and has been on the faculty at
Bowdoin College since 1995.

Jerry Wexler, an inductee of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, began his career
as a cub reporter for Billboard, where, among other achievements, he convinced
the magazine to use the phrase “rhythm and blues” instead of “race records.” He
then became a partner at Atlantic Records, where he produced records by Ray
Charles, Ruth Brown, Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, Dusty Springfield, Willie
Nelson, Otis Redding, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Etta James, Carlos
Santana, Esther Phillips, Percy Sledge, Solomon Burke, Dr. John, the Drifters, Big
Joe Turner, Doug Sahm, and Bob Dylan, to name just a few. He is the author, with
David Ritz, of Rhythm & the Blues: A Life in American Music.

Lauren Wilcox grew up in Durham, North Carolina. She has written for the
Washington Post and The Paris Review, and was a former staffer at The Oxford
American.

Marc Woodworth is the author of Bee Thousand in Continuum’s 33 1/3 series as
well as Arcade, a volume of poetry. He is an editor at Salmagundi and lecturer at
Skidmore College.

Elizabeth Wurtzel is the author of Prozac Nation, Bitch: In Praise of Difficult
Women, and More, Now, Again. She is a graduate of Yale Law School, and lives in
New York City.

Steve Yarbrough is the author of four novels, three short-story collections, and
numerous essays and reviews. He is the James and Coke Hallowell Professor of
Creative Writing at California State University, Fresno, where he directs the
school’s MFA program. Yarbrough plays a 1984 Martin D-35 and has recently
taught himself to make noise on a 1961 Harmony Monterey mandolin.