Robert Atwan is the series editor of The Best American Essays, which he founded in 1986. He has written for *The New York Times*, *The Los Angeles Times*, T*he St. Petersburg Times*, the *Boston Review*, and the *Atlantic Monthly*. He has authored studies of popular culture and has contributed criticism and poetry to the *Iowa Review*, the *Kenyon Review*, the *Denver Quarterly*, and *Image*. Atwan has edited college anthologies, collections of current journalism, political essays, two collections of poetry inspired by the Bible, and contributed introductions to a new series of Shakespeare plays.

Before taking on leadership of \_The Baffler\_, Summers had taught at Harvard University and Columbia University, where he was lecturer on American studies in 2008-2009. He also served as the editor of *The Politics of Truth: Selected Writings of C. Wright Mills* and is the author of *Every Fury on Earth*, a collection of his essays on history and politics. (Photo: Robert Birnbaum)

Jerald Walker is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is currently Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Emerson College. His work has appeared in *The Best American Essays*, *Best African American Essays*, *The Missouri Review*, and *The Iowa Review*, among others. His new book, *Street Shadows: A Memoir of Race, Rebellion, and Redemption*, diagrams his life – growing up with his parents, both of whom were blind and members of a religious cult, and six siblings in a Chicago housing project, his history with drug addiction, and his struggle against racism when he returned to school as a young adult. Robert Atwan calls *Street Shadows*, “a daring, evocative, and unflinchingly honest memoir by an extraordinary writer with an extraordinary story to tell.”