– Note on Contributors –

WILLIAM MAX NELSON is a writer and historian born in California and raised in Maryland. He now lives in Canada where he is a professor at the University of Toronto. He has published numerous academic works on the intellectual history of the Enlightenment and the development of early modern globalization.

LAURA ESTHER WOLFSON works as a translator of ­Russian, French, and Spanish to English. For many years, she served as the interpreter for Russian-speaking authors at the PEN World Voices Festival and as a PEN prison writing mentor. Her work has been listed as ‘notable’ in five of the last seven editions of Best American Essays.

GARRET KEIZER is the author of eight books, including Getting Schooled (2014), Privacy (2012), and The Unwanted Sound of Everything We Want (2010). He has been a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine since 2006, the same year he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in nonfiction. His essays have appeared in Agni, The Boston Globe, Harper’s, The Kenyon Review, Lapham’s Quarterly, The Los Angeles Times, Mother Jones, The New York Times, The Village Voice, and Virginia Quarterly Review, as well as The Best American Essays for 2007, 2009, and 2012, and The Best American Science and Nature Writing for 2002.

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