The Best American Essays 2011 Part 13

I thought about this essay a lot over the next few days, like he was beside me, equal parts familiar and strange. But the thing about life is that you simply cannot settle for melancholy, even when it's true. You are not a tragedy, you are a personal essay. You must rise above and you must do it in the last paragraph with basic grammar and easily recognized words.

Anyway, come November I will be buying every copy of Marie Claire I can get my one good hand on! You'll find me on [>]. If you haven't looked death straight in the eye or been sued by a sister wife, you won't see yourself in my story. But you will find solace in knowing your own problems are petty and ba.n.a.l. I have ascended victorious from the ashes of immeasurable self-doubt and pain. And I have not simply survived, I have flourished.

Unprepared.

Jerald Walker.

FROM Harvard Review.

WE DROVE CAUTIOUSLY through the downpour, making the kind of small talk one would expect of strangers, when my companion slid a jacket from his lap, exposing his p.e.n.i.s. It rose up high through his zipper, like a single meerkat surveying the land for trouble. To be sure, there was trouble to be had because, despite being a skinny seventeen-year-old, I never left home without my razor.

But what I'd really needed that morning was an umbrella. Rain had begun falling in sheets a few minutes earlier as I'd sprinted to catch the Seventy-ninth Street bus, which pulled away just before I reached it. My frustration had not had a chance to sink in when an Oldsmobile stopped in front of me. The driver offered me a ride. I was immediately put on guard, since random acts of kindness were rare for the South Side of Chicago. In the instant before I opened the pa.s.senger door, I decided that a robbery would put me back only six dollars, making it worth the risk. But if he had designs on my leather Converse All Stars, as had a previous robber, I might have to offer some resistance, depending on whether or not he drew a gun.

The other robber had not. He'd merely dragged me into an alley and begun punching my face while explaining, "This is a stickup, motherf.u.c.ker!" Next he searched my pockets, finding and taking my only dollar and a bus transfer. He cursed and hit me once more. Then he jabbed a finger at my shoes. "Give me those!" he commanded. "Give me your coat too!" He didn't seem to mind that it was winter and the ground was covered in snow. After he fled with my belongings, I went back to where he had accosted me to wait for the bus that would complete the final leg of my trip to basketball practice, due to start in twenty minutes at 7 A.M. When the bus arrived, I explained to the driver what had happened. He waived the fare, gave me a tissue to wipe my bloodied nose, and a few miles later deposited me between stops, right at the fieldhouse door. This had happened five years earlier, when I was only a child of twelve. And unarmed.

"So, do you play sports?" this driver was asking me. He wore a large Afro and lush sideburns that reached to his chin, typical of the current style. I figured him to be around fifty.

"Little bit," I said.

"What do you play?"

"Hoops."

"Oh, yeah?"

I nodded. "Yeah."

"What position?"

"Point guard."

"Going to shoot some now?"

I shook my head. "Work."

"What do you do?"

"I'm a lab a.s.sistant at the medical center."

"What does a lab a.s.sistant do?"

"Clean p.i.s.s and s.h.i.+t from test tubes."

"Does that pay well?"

I looked at him. "Well enough."

We stopped at a red light. The wipers slapped at the rain, filling the silence. The p.e.n.i.s continued its watch. I looked around myself, amazed at how dark it was for midmorning, and at how many people, like me, had been caught unprepared. They darted about beneath newspapers or stood huddled in doorways, while I sat relatively dry, convinced that both my six dollars and my All Stars were safe. It was my body this man wanted, and that, I believed, was safe too. When the subject of s.e.x was broached-verbally, that is-I would simply state that men weren't my thing. I relaxed in my seat and waited for his proposition, hoping it wouldn't come before we'd traveled the remaining ten blocks to the elevated train station, where he'd agreed to take me.

Meanwhile, fifteen hundred miles away in Atlanta, another black male may also have believed his body was safe, just prior to being slain and dumped in the Chattahoochee River.

His name was Nathaniel Cater. His murder was unusual only in the fact that he was twenty-seven, much older than the other victims, and in the fact that there had been other victims. Twenty by that point, all of them between the ages of nine and fourteen, and all of them black males. The first murder had occurred two years prior, in 1979-a fourteen-year-old boy found in the woods, a gunshot to his head. Nearby was the boy's friend, who had been asphyxiated. A few months later, a ten-year-old boy was found dead in a dumpster. And then a strangled nine-year-old; a stabbed fourteen-year-old; a strangled thirteen-year-old; murder after murder until the capriciousness of Negroes could no longer be sustained as a viable cause. There was clearly a holocaust in the making, a systemic denial of future black generations, a conclusion that flowed logically from the vicious legacy of the Deep South. This was the work of the Ku Klux Klan, people believed, and I believed it too. The South, as promised, was rising again.

Each night, on the evening news, I watched efforts to keep it down. New York's Guardian Angels, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, and grieving parents gave press conferences. There were images of helicopters flying over homes and of bloodhounds sniffing through parks. Psychics traveled through time and returned with tips and warnings. Confidential hotlines collected the names of would-be killers. Rewards were posted. Sammy Davis Jr. and Frank Sinatra gave a benefit concert. Green ribbons were worn. And through it all, the murders continued to mount, until June 21, 1981-just a month after I'd accepted the ride with the stranger-when the police arrested a twenty-three-year-old man named Wayne Williams.

Being male, single, introverted, and a loner, Williams fit the general profile of a serial killer, except for the all-important fact that he was black. And so rather than a collective sigh of relief in the black community, there was broad outrage, for we all understood that we were not serial killers. The arrest of Williams was a smoke screen, it was decided, another cover-up by white supremacists of their sordid deeds. Sure, we had some rotten apples among us, your garden variety of thugs, burglars, prost.i.tutes, g.a.n.g.b.a.n.gers, and dope dealers. We even had middle-aged men in cars who'd solicit s.e.x from teenaged boys, but the torturing and execution of people for sport or at the behest of inner voices, that pathological s.h.i.+t, was the strict domain of white folks. It wasn't in our DNA.

That's why we'd not produced an Ed Gein, for instance, the man whose barbarity inspired the movies Psycho and Silence of the Lambs. When his ten-year killing spree ended, it was discovered that he lived, literally, in a house of horrors, with the flesh of his victims serving as furniture upholstery, jewelry, and clothing. His mother's heart was simmering on the stove. John Wayne Gacy was another: he killed twenty-four boys and men, cutting their throats while in the act of raping them. And how about Herman Mugett, the doctor who was said to have murdered over two hundred women by asphyxiating them in a secret chamber in his office? Then there was Albert Fish, who may have mutilated and killed up to one hundred boys; Ted Bundy, the necrophiliac who applied makeup to his victims and slept with them until they decomposed; David "Son of Sam" Berkowitz, who killed women by order of howling dogs. The list also includes Richard Angelo, Jeffrey Dalmer, Gary Ridgeway, Andrew Cunanan, but no one knew of them yet, because it was still only the spring of 1981, a month before Wayne Williams's arrest and a year before his conviction of the Atlanta Child Murders. All during the trial he maintained his innocence, and I, convinced not of a lack of evidence-there was plenty-but only of our genetic superiority, was among the many blacks who believed him.

As we approach the thirtieth anniversary of these crimes, Williams has yet to own his guilt. I use this occasion to own mine. My belief that blacks could be only so bad was equivalent to the view, promulgated since slavery, that we could be only so good; to hold one of these views necessitates the holding of the other. And both views, albeit used for different purposes, place false restrictions on our humanity. At the time of Williams's conviction, I was incapable of reaching this conclusion. The seed of it was planted, however, only three weeks later, when a thirty-three-year-old black man from Michigan, "Coral" Eugene Watts, confessed to killing forty women and girls. His preferred modi operandi were death by drowning, strangling, and stabbing, and his preferred race was white. This was in part why he was so difficult to capture, since a defining trait of serial killers is that they rarely kill outside of their own ethnic group, and this was the same trait that, ironically, made the case stronger against Williams. But just as many blacks came to Williams's defense, the impulse was to defend Watts as well, for here might be a vigilante of sorts, an intensely angry brother out to exact the ultimate revenge on his oppressor. That argument couldn't hold water, though; all it took was for Watts to explain that he'd dreamed of killing women since he was twelve, describe at length his conversations with demons, and express his need to drown some of his victims in order to keep their evil spirits from floating free. This was no vigilante. This was just a man-as vile and deranged as any white counterpart who had preceded him or who would follow. And he, like Wayne Williams, and like Gein, Bundy, Mugett, and the others, belonged to us all.

As did my driver. As did I. And so the scenario in which we found ourselves that rainy morning was susceptible to the full range of human behavior, not merely the one I had envisioned and, luckily, the one that played out. A block from my destination, he removed a twenty-dollar bill from his s.h.i.+rt pocket and positioned it on the seat between us. Just before that we'd spoken of the Bulls, the White Sox, the storm, and then, as the train station came into view, he circled the conversation back to my job at the medical center. "I wouldn't care for that," he said. "Do you like it?"

"It's just a job," I said. "Pays the bills."

It was the wrong thing to say, or maybe it was the right thing, because my reference to money brought the issue to the fore. It was then that he'd produced the twenty-dollar bill. "Would you like to make a little extra?" he asked, winking at me. "Have a little fun in the process?"

I stated the response I'd mentally rehea.r.s.ed since he'd exposed himself: "Sorry, brother, but men just aren't my thing."

"I can give you forty," he said quickly, as if he'd been mentally rehearsing too. I told him no again. He swore. But I didn't panic. I didn't reach for my razor. I repeated my position and thanked him for the ride. We drove the rest of the way in silence. Just before he stopped the car, he pulled his jacket back onto his lap, picked up the money, and in this manner-without theft, without violence, without murder, without the slightest decrease in my stupidity-the trip came to an end.

The Was.h.i.+ng.

Reshma Memon Yaqub.

FROM The Was.h.i.+ngton Post Magazine.

I HADN'T PLANNED to wash the corpse.

But sometimes you just get caught up in the moment.

Through a series of slight miscalculations, I am the first of the deceased woman's relatives to arrive at the March Funeral Home in west Baltimore on this Monday morning. The body of the woman whom everyone in the family refers to simply as Dadee, which means "grandmother" in Urdu, is scheduled to arrive at 10 A.M., after being released from Howard County General Hospital in Columbia. I get to the funeral home at 10 A.M. and make somber chitchat with the five women from the local mosque who have volunteered to help with funeral preparations, which includes was.h.i.+ng the deceased's body.

According to Islamic practices, family members of the same gender as the deceased are expected to bathe and shroud the body for burial. But because it's such a detailed ritual and because so many second-generation American Muslim families have yet to bury a loved one here, mosques have volunteers to a.s.sist grieving families. These women have come from the Islamic Society of Baltimore, where Dadee's funeral prayer service will be held this afternoon.

When the body arrives at 11:30 A.M., I am still the only family member here, and the body-washers naturally usher me in to join them for the ritual cleansing. It feels too late to tell them that technically I'm not a relative. When I first met the women an hour ago and spoke to them in my halting Urdu, it seemed unnecessary to explain that I was only about to become Dadee's relative. That she was the visiting grandmother of the woman engaged to marry my younger brother. That she had flown in from South Africa just ten days earlier to attend the upcoming wedding. That the only time I'd ever seen Dadee was last night at the hospital, a few hours after she died of sudden cardiac arrest, and then I hadn't even seen her face. When I had arrived at the hospital after getting the call from my brother, a white sheet was already drawn up over Dadee's face and tucked around her slight, eight-decade-old frame.

But the body-washers are understandably in a bit of a hurry. They've been kept waiting. And these genuinely kind women, five middle-aged homemakers, have their own responsibilities to get back to. I call my brother's fiancee to tell her the women want to start the hour-l ong was.h.i.+ng, and she gives the go-ahead because she and her parents are still at the hospital. I tell the washers they can start, and they look at me expectantly. "Let's go," they say in Urdu. "Uh, okay," I reply. It's not that I don't want to wash the body. It's actually something I've wanted to experience for a while. Earlier in the year, I told the funeral coordinator at my mosque to keep me in mind if the need ever arose when I'm available. A few years ago, I attended a daylong workshop on how to perform the ritual. It's just, I didn't think today was going to be the day. I didn't think this was going to be my first body. I had come here, on this fall day in 2008, only to offer emotional support to my future sister-in-law and her mother.

I mutely follow the women through a heavy door marked "Staff Only," then down a flight of concrete stairs into the recesses of the funeral home. I'm starting to feel as though I'm trapped in one of those old I Love Lucy episodes, where Lucille Ball finds herself stomping grapes or smuggling cheese and has no idea how to stop this runaway train. We reach a large open room, where I see some gurneys and a simple coffin-upholstered in blue fabric with a white interior. Another doorway leads into a smaller private room that has been set up for ritual was.h.i.+ngs such as these, one of the volunteers tells me. From the doorway, I see Dadee's form in her hospital-issue white body bag, zipped all the way up. She is lying on a metal gurney, which, with its slightly raised edges, looks like a giant jellyroll pan. It has a quarter-sized hole at the bottom, near Dadee's feet, and the silver tray is tilted slightly so the water we will use drains into a utility sink.

I am not afraid of dead bodies. I have seen one up close three times in my thirty-six years: in high school at the funeral of a friend's father; as a police reporter when I took a tour of the local morgue; and more recently when a friend's ill baby died. But this is the first time I will touch a corpse, and that I am a little nervous about. But I'm also grateful for the opportunity. In Islam, it is a tremendous honor to give a body its final cleansing. The reward is immense-the erasure of forty major sins from your lifetime's record. Few people I know have ever washed a body. Because my parents and their peers moved here from Pakistan as young adults, most of them missed the natural opportunity to wash their own parents' or grandparents' bodies when they pa.s.sed away overseas. And because few of my Muslim peers have lost their parents, we are two generations that don't know what to do when the time comes.

I feel blessed not to be experiencing my first was.h.i.+ng with one of my own loved ones, when I would be numb from loss. I would have had little time to prepare myself because Muslims are buried immediately after death-the same day when possible. There is no embalming, no makeup, no Sunday finery for the deceased. There is no wake, no long speech, no cherrywood coffin with bra.s.s handles. There is simply the ritual was.h.i.+ng, the shrouding in plain white cloth, a funeral prayer that lasts five minutes, and then the burial-preferably the body straight into the dirt, but, when required by law, placed in a basic coffin.

Body-washers put on sterile scrubs to protect us from whatever illness may have stricken the deceased. First I tie on a large paper ap.r.o.n. Then come rubber gloves. I see one of the women pull on a second pair of gloves over the first, and I follow. Next are puffy paper sleeves that attach from elbow to wrist and are tucked into the gloves. Then big paper booties. And finally a face mask with a large transparent plastic eye s.h.i.+eld. By the end, I look like a cross between an overzealous nail technician and a Transformer.

I watch the women unzip Dadee from her body bag. As it opens, I see her face for the first time. Muslims believe that at the moment of death, when a soul that's headed to heaven emerges from its body, it slips out as easily as a drop of water spilling from a jug. But a soul that's headed to less heavenly places emerges with great difficulty, like a th.o.r.n.y branch being ripped through a pile of wet wool. I'm relieved that Dadee's face is peaceful, the way you hope somebody's grandmother's face would appear.

I stand by Dadee's feet, on her right side, and watch the women gently lift and rock Dadee to free her from the body bag. She's still dressed in her blue-and-white hospital gown. One of the women slowly lifts the gown, while another drapes Dadee with one of the same long ap.r.o.ns that we are all wearing. Not for one moment are any private areas of the body exposed. In the ritual Islamic bathing, the body is to be given the utmost respect. Not only is it to stay covered at all times, but the washers are to remain forever silent about anything negative or unusual they may witness-for example, if there is an unexpected scar, or deformity, or tattoo. In this, a human's most vulnerable of moments, she is guaranteed protection by her family and community.

It is time to begin the was.h.i.+ng. A thin rubber hose is attached to the faucet in the utility sink, and one of the women turns on the water, adjusting it until it is comfortably warm, as prescribed by Islamic tradition. Because I'm the only "relative" in the room, I'm expected to perform the lion's share of the was.h.i.+ng, but the women see that I have no idea what I'm doing, so they resume control, leaving me in charge of the feet. The first time I touch Dadee's feet, I am surprised. I expect the corpse to be cold, but it feels warm. Then again, she left this sh.e.l.l less than a day earlier. Perhaps these things take time.

A Muslim's body is generally washed three times from head to toe with soap and clean water. The right side is washed first, then the left. During the final was.h.i.+ng, a softly fragranced oil is rubbed onto the body. The body has to be repeatedly tilted from one side to the other, and it is harder than I expected to maneuver the dead weight of a human form. Dadee's feet keep getting in the way of the hole at the bottom of the table, and every few minutes, the water pools up there and I have to lift her leg.

Fifteen minutes into the was.h.i.+ng, my brother's fiancee and her mother knock at the door. The granddaughter is too distraught to join in and watches tearfully from the doorway. But Dadee's daughter-in-law dons the gear and steps into her family role. She is understandably traumatized, having been the one to find Dadee collapsed at their home in Columbia last night and having performed CPR to try to revive her. This is her first time was.h.i.+ng a body too. I can't tell if she wants me to stay and keep was.h.i.+ng, or leave, because we've met just a handful of times in the three months since my brother proposed to her daughter. But she doesn't say anything, so I stay.

Was.h.i.+ng a body in this way, it's impossible not to flash forward to your own ending. I have lain on a table like this before, draped strategically with white cloth, comforting hands laid on me. But that was just for a ma.s.sage at the Red Door Spa. When I imagine my own was.h.i.+ng, I see myself being handled by loved ones: my two oldest friends, Farin and Sajeela; my brothers' wives; my mother and mother-in-law. I've also asked two women at my mosque whom I adore to partic.i.p.ate. Maybe I'll live long enough to have a daughter-in-law in the room with me. Should I be so lucky, even a granddaughter. The more I see, the more I appreciate the way a Muslim's body is handled after death. There is so much gentleness, so much privacy. The body isn't left unattended in the short span between death and burial. It unnerves me when, walking through the funeral home's hallway, I look into a room and see a dead man lying on a gurney, unattended. I wonder how long he has been there, how he has been handled, who has had access to him. Whether the water that ran over his body was warmed.

The body-washers pa.s.s the rubber hose back and forth to each other and to me and my soon-to-be relative, who strokes her mother-in-law's hair and washes it. At the end, we dry Dadee with clean white towels and slide several towels underneath her, with their edges hanging over the sides of the gurney. We then roll her gurney into the adjacent room where the coffin awaits for her transport to the mosque. We station her gurney next to a second one, where one of the women has already laid out Dadee's funeral shroud, called a kafan, made of five white cloths of different sizes. We use the towels underneath Dadee as handles to lift her to the second gurney. Pieces of the white fabric are folded around Dadee's body and secured with ropelike strands of the same cloth. One of the volunteers, Rabia Marfani, a.s.sembles these fabric kits at home, using cotton/polyester bed sheets that she buys at Walmart.

When the cloth that wraps the hair back is tied on Dadee, she seems strangely transported. She looks so small and fragile, like a little girl with a bonnet tied around her hair. Finally, a large cloth is folded around the entire body, completely enclosing her. It's tied shut with the ropelike strands, and the body looks almost like a wrapped gift. Together we lift Dadee into the coffin. One of the women shows me and Dadee's daughter-in-law how to open the fabric around Dadee's face, should any of her family members ask to see her one last time at the Janazah prayer service at the mosque.

Afterward, I hug each of the body-washers and thank them deeply for their help. Although Dadee is not exactly my relative, I feel as though these women have done me a huge personal favor, expecting nothing in return. When I ask Marfani why she has partic.i.p.ated in this custom more than thirty times in her fifty years, she replies: "It's our obligation. And there is so much reward from G.o.d ... One day I will also be lying there, and somebody will do this for me." She started as a teenager in Pakistan, a.s.sisting when her grandmother and aunt pa.s.sed away. She encourages younger women to volunteer or just watch, because this knowledge needs to be pa.s.sed on.

We all then raise our hands and pray, asking G.o.d to forgive Dadee's sins, to give her the best in the next life. I inwardly alternate between speaking to G.o.d and speaking to Dadee. I ask G.o.d to welcome her; I wish Dadee good luck on this ultimate pilgrimage. Islam teaches us that after the soul is removed from the body, it briefly faces G.o.d to learn its fate, then is returned to the body while on its way to the grave. There it awaits its full reckoning on the Day of Judgment. Though Dadee is no l onger of this world, she can continue to earn blessings based on what she has left behind-through righteous offspring who pray for her forgiveness, through knowledge that she has spread to others, or through charitable work whose effects outlast her.

I pray for Dadee, and I also apologize to her for a mistake she doesn't know I nearly made. In today's mail, after the funeral, Dadee's family will receive my hand-addressed invitation to her for a wedding reception hosted by my parents. Earlier this week, I had argued with my brother over the unnecessary expense of mailing separate invitations to multiple family members at the same address. I had considered just sending a joint one. In the end, how grateful I am that I did it his way. Of course you deserve your own invitation, Dadee, after flying across the world to witness your granddaughter's wedding.

I ask G.o.d one last time to have mercy on her soul. As I pick up my purse and turn to leave the room, I address my final words to both of them: "Innaa lillaahi wa-innaa ilaihi raje'oon." To G.o.d we belong, and to G.o.d we return.

Contributors' Notes.

Notable Essays of 2010.

Contributors' Notes.

HILTON ALS is a staff writer at The New Yorker. He also writes for the New York Review of Books.

MISCHA BERLINSKI is the author of Fieldwork: A Novel.

KATY BUTLER, a 2004 finalist for a National Magazine Award, has written for The New Yorker, the New York Times, Mother Jones, Salon, Tricycle, and other magazines. She was born in South Africa and raised in England, and came to the United States with her family at the age of eight. "Everything Is Holy," her essay about nature wors.h.i.+p, Buddhism, and ecology, was selected for Best Buddhist Writing 2006. In 2009 she won a literary award from the Elizabeth George Foundation, administered by Hedgebrook, a colony for women writers where she was a resident. "What Broke My Father's Heart" was named a "notable narrative" by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, won a first-place award from the a.s.sociation of Health Care Journalists, and was named one of the 100 Best Magazine Articles of All Time. Butler has taught narrative nonfiction at Nieman Foundation conferences and memoir writing at Esalen Inst.i.tute. Her current book project is Knocking on Heaven's Door: A Journey Through Old Age and New Medicine to be published in 2013. She lives in the San Francis...o...b..y Area.

STEVEN CHURCH is the author of The Day After the Day After: My Atomic Angst, Theoretical Killings: Essays and Accidents, and The Guinness Book of Me: A Memoir of Record (winner of the 2006 Colorado Book Award). His stories and essays have been published in Agni, Fourth Genre, Brevity, The Pinch, Wag's Revue, Colorado Review, North American Review, Waccamaw, The Pedestrian, and many other places. He teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Fresno State and is a founding editor of the literary magazine The Normal School.

PAUL CRENSHAW'S stories and essays have appeared in The Best American Essays 2005, Shenandoah, North American Review, Southern Humanities Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, and South Dakota Review, among others. He teaches writing and literature at Elon University. "After the Ice" is one of a collection of essays set mainly in the writer's hometown in Arkansas.

TOI DERRICOTTE, a professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, has published four books of poems, The Empress of the Death House, Natural Birth, Captivity, and Tender, winner of the 1998 Paterson Poetry Prize, as well as a memoir, The Black Notebooks, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellows.h.i.+p, two fellows.h.i.+ps in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, and two Pushcart Prizes. She is the cofounder of Cave Canem, the workshop/retreat for African American poets. Her most recent book of poetry, The Undertaker's Daughter, will be out in October.

MEENAKs.h.i.+ GIGI DURHAM'S short stories, essays, and scholarly articles have appeared in a variety of publications, including The Chronicle of Higher Education and Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. She is the author of The Lolita Effect and coeditor of Media and Cultural Studies: Key Works. She is an a.s.sociate professor of journalism at the University of Iowa, where she has taught since 2000. She is currently at work on an academic book, a variety of essays and short stories, and a novel.

BERNADETTE ESPOSITO learned to investigate air disasters at the NTSB Training Center in Ashburn, Virginia. Her essays have been winners of or finalists for a Pushcart Prize, the University of New Orleans Writing Contest, the Plonsker Prize, and a Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Award. She is finis.h.i.+ng a collection of essays on plane crashes and teaching math in Laramie, Wyoming.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and a visiting professor of liberal studies at the New School. He is the author of numerous books, including works on Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, George Orwell, Mother Teresa, Henry Kissinger, and Bill and Hillary Clinton, as well as his international bestseller and National Book Award nominee, G.o.d Is Not Great. His most recent book is a memoir, Hitch-22.

PICO IYER is the author of two novels and seven works of nonfiction, including Video Night in Kathmandu, The Lady and the Monk, The Global Soul, and, most recently, The Open Road. An essayist for Time magazine since 1986, he also writes frequently for the New York Review of Books, Harper's Magazine, the New York Times, and many others. His next book, an extended essay on fathers, Graham Greene, and hauntedness, The Man Within My Head, comes out in the spring of 2012.

VICTOR LAVALLE is the author of a collection of stories, Slapboxing with Jesus, and two novels, The Ecstatic and Big Machine, for which he won the s.h.i.+rley Jackson Award, the American Book Award, and the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. He is a 2010 Guggenheim Award winner and an a.s.sistant professor at Columbia University's School of the Arts. About "Long Distance" he says: "This essay actually came about when I was asked to write about my life after having lost a great deal of weight. And yet, when I sat down to work, all I could do was return to that time when I was much heavier and deeply unhappy. Why? I sure didn't miss those days. And yet, I felt I couldn't write about my present without touching on that past. But, of course, I never reach the true present in the essay. Maybe I still don't know how to talk about a life with greater happiness. Or I'm still trying to break free from the romance of misery. That has destroyed better writers than me."

CHARLIE LEDUFF was awarded the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for his contributions to a New York Times series, "How Race Is Lived in America." The author of two books, Work and Other Sins: Life in New York City and Thereabouts and US Guys: The True and Twisted Mind of the American Man, he has written and hosted shows for the Discovery Channel and the BBC. His upcoming memoir is t.i.tled Detroit: An American Autopsy.

CHANG-RAE LEE is the author of four novels: Native Speaker, A Gesture Life, Aloft, and most recently, The Surrendered, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He teaches at Princeton University.

MADGE MCKEITHEN has written essays that have been published in literary journals, anthologies, newspapers, and online. Her first book, Blue Peninsula: Essential Words for a Life of Loss and Change, was published in 2006. Born and raised in North Carolina, she moved to New York City in 2003 and began teaching in the Writing Program at the New School, work she will continue online while teaching in person in Tashkent, Uzbekistan.

CARYL PHILLIPS is the author of nine novels (The Final Pa.s.sage, A State of Independence, Higher Ground, Cambridge, Crossing the River, The Nature of Blood, A Distant Sh.o.r.e, Dancing in the Dark, and In the Falling Snow), four books of nonfiction (The European Tribe, The Atlantic Sound, A New World Order, and Foreigners), and four stage plays (Strange Fruit, Where There Is Darkness, The Shelter, and Rough Crossings). Besides several screenplays, he has written many dramas and doc.u.mentaries for radio and television. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he currently is a professor of English at Yale University. His most recent book is a collection of essays, Colour Me English.

BRIDGET POTTER was born in Brompton-on-Swale, Yorks.h.i.+re, and came to the United States as a teenager in 1958. She spent the first forty years of her career in television, beginning as a secretary, then as a producer and an executive, including fifteen years as senior vice president of original programming at HBO. In 2007 she earned a BA in cultural anthropology from Columbia University. This year she will complete an MFA in nonfiction, also from Columbia, where she has been an instructor in the University Writing Program. She is currently working on her first book, a memoir/social history of the 1960s, from which her essay "Lucky Girl" is adapted. She has two grown daughters and lives in Manhattan and Wa.s.saic, New York.

LIA PURPURA'S recent books include On Looking a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in nonfiction, and King Baby (poems), winner of the Beatrice Hawley Award. Her awards include NEA and Fulbright Fellows.h.i.+ps, three Pushcart Prizes, the a.s.sociated Writing Programs Award in Nonfiction, and the Ohio State University Press Award in Poetry, among others. Recent poems and essays appear in Agni, Field, The Georgia Review, Orion, The New Republic, and The New Yorker, and her new collection of essays, Rough Likeness, will be out in January 2012. She is writer in residence at Loyola University in Baltimore, Maryland, and teaches in the Rainier Writing Workshop MFA Program.

RACHEL RIEDERER has written for The Nation, Science, and The Rumpus, among other publications. She holds a BA from Harvard and an MFA from Columbia, where she taught academic writing. She is currently at work on a book of travel narrative and environmental reportage about Lake Victoria.

PATRICIA SMITH is the author of five books of poetry, including Blood Dazzler, chronicling the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina, which was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award, and Teahouse of the Almighty, a National Poetry Series selection. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, TriQuarterly, and The Best American Poetry 2011. She is a Pushcart Prize winner and a four-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam, the most successful poet in the compet.i.tion's history. Currently she is a professor at the City University of New York/College of Staten Island and is on the faculty of both Cave Canem and the Stonecoast MFA program at the University of Southern Maine.

ZADIE SMITH is the author of three novels, White Teeth (2000), The Autograph Man (2002), and On Beauty (2005), which won the 2006 Orange Prize for Fiction. She is also the author of Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays (2009) and the editor of a story collection, The Book of Other People (2007).

SUSAN STRAIGHT has published seven novels, including Highwire Moon, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and the companion novels A Million Nightingales and Take One Candle Light a Room, which follow a family from slavery in Louisiana to contemporary life in California. Her new novel, Between Heaven and Here, is forthcoming. She has written essays for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Believer, The Oxford American, Harper's Magazine, Salon, and other publications.

CHRISTY VANNOY writes an ongoing column of stories for McSweeneys. net and is currently working on her first book. She lives in New York City.

JERALD WALKER is the author of Street Shadows: A Memoir of Race, Rebellion, and Redemption, recipient of the 2011 PEN New England/L. L. Win-s.h.i.+p Award for Nonfiction and named a Best Memoir of the Year by Kirkus Reviews. His essays have appeared in numerous periodicals and anthologies, including Creative Nonfiction, The Harvard Review, Mother Jones, The Missouri Review, The Iowa Review, The Best African American Essays, and twice before in The Best American Essays. Walker is an a.s.sociate professor of creative writing at Emerson College. "Unprepared" is from a collection of essays in progress.

RESHMA MEMON YAQUB wouldn't even be fit to write a grocery list were it not for her guardian editors: Mich.e.l.le Gaps, Leslie Morgan Steiner, Lynda Robinson, Betty Wong, Bonnie Miller Rubin, Stephen Franklin, Carol Kleiman, Diane Debrovner, Laszlo Domjan, John Dowd, Sydney Trent, Sally Lee, Fred Hiatt, John Koten, Dan Ferrara, Tom Nawrocki. Writers she adores to the point of having pretend conversations in her head with them: Christiane Northrup, Brian Doyle, Lisa Kogan, Anne Lamott, Justin Halpern, Iris Krasnow, Michael Pollan, Louise Hay. Her stories owe many glorious plot twists to Zain, eleven, and Zach, seven. Ditto their dad (Amer) and grandparents (Ali, Razia, Muhammad, Nasreen). Costars: Sophie, Sana, Yousef, and Maryam. Miss Yaqub lives in Bethesda, Maryland. Her next project is an investigation into the whereabouts of two missing people: Mr. Right and Ms. Memoir Literary Agent. Sightings may be reported to her via Facebook.