A. T. Grant is the author of Collected Alex and WAKE. He lives in Virginia, where people call him Alex.
Gabriel Heller’s essays and stories have appeared in Agni Online, The Gettysburg Review, and the Stranger, among other publications. He is the recipient of the 14th annual Inkwell Short Story Award as well as a notable story citation in The Best American Mystery Stories 2013. He lives in Brooklyn and teaches writing at NYU.
Adam Johnson is the author of The Orphan Master’s Son, which won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, as well as Parasites Like Us, a novel, and the story collection Emporium. His forthcoming story collection, Interesting Facts, will be published by Random House in 2015.
Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah is an essayist whose writing has appeared in The Paris Review, Bookforum, Transition, the New York Observer, and Rolling Stone. She has taught at Columbia University, Bard College, and Eugene Lang College. More of her work can be found at the-rachelkaadzighansah.tumblr.com.
Lally Katz is an American-born playwright living in Australia. After Shakespeare, she is currently the most produced playwright in Australia. She has written over forty full-length plays and won multiple awards.
Dan Keane served as the AP’s last gringo correspondent in Bolivia, and received an MFA from the University of Michigan. His AP journalism has been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and dozens of other newspapers. His freelance work has appeared in the Austin Chronicle, ArtForum, and the Village Voice. He currently lives in Shanghai.
Ali Liebegott is the author of the following books: The Beautifully Worthless, The IHOP Papers, and Cha-Ching! The poem included in this collection was part of a project in which Liebegott wrote a poem every day for three months until she qualified for health insurance at her cashier job. The only rule was that each poem had to begin with the first thing that she rang up that day. She currently lives in Los Angeles and is a staff writer for the TV show Transparent.
Karen Maner is a graduate of the MFA program at Eastern Washington University and a winner of the 2013 AWP Intro Journals Project. After spending some time in Europe and Asia, she’s back in her hometown, Dayton, Ohio, working on essays, paintings, and getting her mind out of the gutter.
Luke Mogelson lived in Afghanistan between June 2011 and December 2013, writing for the New York Times Magazine. He has also reported from the war in Syria for The New Yorker. He currently lives in Mexico, where he is working on a collection of short stories.
Maia Morgan’s work has appeared in Glamour, Creative Nonfiction, and The Chattahoochee Review and is forthcoming in Hayden’s Ferry Review. She just finished her first book, The Saltwater Twin and Other Mythical Creatures. Visit thesaltwatertwin.com for updates and posts on words, memory, road trips, yoga, and dogs. She teaches writing and theater in schools, health care facilities, and jails in Chicago.
Anders Nilsen is the award-winning artist and author of the books Big Questions, Rage of Poseidon, Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow, and The End, among others. His work has been translated widely and shown internationally. He lives in Minneapolis.
Sylvan Oswald’s plays have been produced around the United States and his web series is posted at outtakes.squarespace.com. He lives in Brooklyn and is a resident playwright at New Dramatists. Sylvan oswald.com.
Amos Oz was born in Jerusalem in 1939. He is the author of fourteen novels and collections of short fiction, and numerous works of nonfiction. His acclaimed memoir A Tale of Love and Darkness was an international bestseller and the recipient of the prestigious Goethe Prize, as well as the National Jewish Book Award. Scenes from Village Life, a New York Times Notable Book, was awarded the Prix Méditerranée Étranger in 2010. He lives in Tel Aviv.
Thomas Pierce was born and raised in South Carolina. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Oxford American, Virginia Quarterly Review, Subtropics, The Coffin Factory, and The Atlantic. His debut story collection, Hall of Small Mammals, will be published by Riverhead Books in January 2015. A graduate of the University of Virginia creative writing program, he lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, with his wife and daughter.
Nathaniel Rich is the author of two novels: Odds Against Tomorrow and The Mayor’s Tongue. His essays and journalism appear regularly in The New York Review of Books, the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s Magazine, and Rolling Stone. He lives in New Orleans.
Rebecca Rukeyser is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a native of Davis, California. She has worked in China, Turkey, Japan, and South Korea. She lives in Chicago.
Yumi Sakugawa is a comic book artist and the author of I Think I Am in Friend-Love with You and Your Illustrated Guide to Becoming One with the Universe. She is a regular comic contributor to the Rumpus and Wonderhowto.com, and her short comic stories “Mundane Fortunes for the Next Ten Billion Years” and “Seed Bomb” were selected as notable comics of 2012 and 2013, respectively, by The Best American Comics. A graduate of the fine arts program at UCLA, she lives in Southern California.
Matthew Schultz is a writer interested in both fiction and literary nonfiction. Originally from Massachusetts, he is currently living and writing in Tel Aviv.
Zadie Smith was born in northwest London in 1975 and divides her time between London and New York. Her first novel, White Teeth, was the winner of the Whitbread First Novel Award, the Guardian First Book Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction, and the Commonwealth Writers’ First Book Award. Her second novel, The Autograph Man, won the Jewish Quarterly Wingate Literary Prize. Her third novel, On Beauty, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, won the Commonwealth Writers’ Best Book Award (Eurasia Section), and the Orange Prize for fiction. Her most recent novel, NW, was published in 2012 and has been short listed for the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and the Women’s Prize for Fiction.
Nick Sturm is the author of How We Light, as well as several chapbooks, including the collaborative works Labor Day, with Carrie Lorig, and I Was Not Even Born, with Wendy Xu. He is from Ohio and lives in Florida.
Rachel Swirsky holds an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where the California native took lessons in writing and being cold. Her work has been nominated for the Hugo and the World Fantasy Award, and she is a two-time recipient of the Nebula Award, including a 2014 win for the short story included in this anthology. Her second collection, How the World Became Quiet, came out in September 2013. If she were a dinosaur, she’d want to be a Caudipteryx, because they had feathers and looked ridiculous.
Reggie Watts is an American comedian and musician. He performs regularly on television and radio and in live theater. Watts currently appears on the IFC television series Comedy Bang! Bang!, which began airing in June 2012 and will enter its third season in 2014.
THE BEST AMERICAN NONREQUIRED READING COMMITTEE
The Best American Nonrequired Reading (BANR) committee is composed of a corps of high school students that meet at McSweene’s Publishing in San Francisco and a group of students that gather in Ann Arbor, Michigan, at 826Michigan. Both groups meet weekly and spend the year reading (almost) everything that is published in the United States and, ultimately, selecting the work that ends up in this collection.
Nilo Batle, sixteen, is a junior at the Ruth Asawa School of the Arts in San Francisco. He is an avid rock climber and enjoys making short films in the media department at his school. He loves learning new skills: everything from building a wooden boat to editing a book.
Hanel Baveja is a freshman at Harvard University, where she hopes to become a better writer, thinker, and person. This was her fourth and final year on the BANR committee, and she feels very lucky to have been a part of the BANR team for all of high school. Her favorite authors include Junot Díaz, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Terrence Hayes. Aside from writing, she enjoys croissants and night driving.
Cassie Behler is a junior at Skyline High School in Ann Arbor, Michigan. This is her first year on the BANR committee. She’s very interested in psychology and language, and she writes
poetry almost daily. A huge coffee enthusiast, Cassie plans on staying caffeinated for the rest of her life, and attending many local punk shows in the process.
Lianna Bernstein is a graduate of Ann Arbor’s Pioneer High School. She is spending the year on a kibbutz in northern Israel before heading off to college next year. She often discusses the transportation systems of various cities and sings Beyoncé way too loudly in public spaces. Her passions include lemonade with mint leaves, the rest stops along the Ohio Turnpike, and, of course, nonrequired reading.
Juan Chicas is currently a senior at June Jordan School for Equity in San Francisco. He is known by many as the Duke of the Excelsior, and he rules the neighborhood with a fist of steel. He also likes to play strategy games and destroy all the noobs. He will soon lead a revolution and it will be awesome. You have all been advised.
Claire Fishman is a senior at Community High School in Ann Arbor. This will be her fourth year on the BANR committee, and she couldn’t be more excited for it. She continues to collect a motley assortment of items and has recently acquired Star Trek Band-Aids and a Martin Van Buren trading card. She also loves competing in Academic Games, something she urges you to look into.
Merlin Garcia is a sophomore at Pioneer High School. She loves chicken shawarma and Joe Biden. If she’s not reading, she’s probably watching Scrubs.
Sarah Gargaro is a freshman at Tufts University and a graduate of Greenhills School in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She is a firm believer in having a little dirt under your fingernails, and she has a highly freckled nose. Sarah thoroughly enjoyed her four-year tenure with BANR, stumbling upon some of her favorite pieces of writing in the Robot Shop’s basement.
Neerja Garikipati is a sophomore at Huron High School in Ann Arbor. When she’s not swimming, she can be found doodling on graph paper and playing flute. Most of the time she’d like to be listening to Imagine Dragons or eating sushi. If she had her druthers, she’d be living in Cambridge, England, or San Francisco. This was her first year on the BANR committee and it was excellent.
Sophie Halperin is a senior at Mission High School in San Francisco. She is a Jew. Her parents are still together. Her hobbies include television, baking, and working on her screenplay, Santa-in-Law.
Shalini Lakshmanan is a junior at Huron High School. Even though she is not British, she enjoys a good cuppa with a slice of lemon tea cake. Her heart is set on a quest to find the perfect book that can be read numerous times without boredom, and she wishes that more varieties of mangoes could be made available in the United States.
Rebecca Landau is a freshman at Columbia University. Her life goal is to read everything Ursula K. Le Guin ever wrote. She once entered fairyland with nothing but an iron skillet, but then she got scared and ran away.
Samantha Ng is currently a junior at June Jordan School for Equity. You’re probably wondering how to pronounce her name because it has no vowels: It’s like “ing” but without the “i.” She loves YouTube and Hong Kong-style milk tea. This was her first year on the BANR committee and she loved it.
Annabel Ostrow is a freshman at Stanford University and a graduate of Lick-Wilmerding High School in San Francisco. BANR staff bios are written in May before the book is published, so Annabel is actually a senior at the moment and too busy studying for finals to write a witty bio. Please accept her profuse apologies.
Marco Ponce is currently a junior at George Washigton High School in San Francisco. He has been a BANR attendee for two years now. He picked up lacrosse this year and likes to write in his spare time.
Evelyn Pugh is currently a senior at Ruth Asawa School of the Arts in San Francisco. She’s in the theater department at school and she spends her free time doing homework and thinking grand thoughts. She looks forward to applying to colleges in cities where people have to wear real winter coats.
Anna Sanford, eighteen, has been a part of the BANR program for two years. She is currently a freshman at Wesleyan University in central Connecticut. Anna desperately misses the smell of Mexican food on Valencia Street, the jumpy twine of the banjo at Amnesia, and those long discussions in the McSweeney’s basement—all things that make her homesick for BANR and the Bay Area. In the future, she hopes to become fluent in French and write something that is worth reading.
Frances Saux graduated from the Ruth Asawa School of the Arts in San Francisco, where she studied creative writing. She is now a freshman at Kenyon College. Her favorite writers include Zadie Smith and David Foster Wallace.
Abigail Schott-Rosenfield graduated from the creative writing department of the Ruth Asawa School of the Arts in San Francisco. Now she attends Stanford University, where she plans to study . . . something involving words. She dreams of becoming a polyglot.
Hannah Shevrin is a freshman at Tufts University. She can safely say that, as a member of the BANR committee, she has learned more about Trader Joe’s, octopods, and celebrity baby names than she would have anywhere else. She is a sucker for political TV shows. Her favorite is The West Wing, which might be the reason she is such a speedy walker. You can probably find her reading feminist literature in a plush chair at a coffee shop.
Sarah Starman was a member of BANR for three years. She is currently a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania. She likes sports that don’t require hand-eye coordination, like soccer, ice-skating, skiing, and running. Though she is enjoying Philadelphia, she misses many things about her life in Ann Arbor, especially the basement of the Robot Shop, where she and her amazing coeditors on the BANR committee would meet every Tuesday.
Tammy Tang, eighteen, graduated from Lowell High School in San Francisco and is now a freshman at UC Davis. When she isn’t pondering the mysteries of life, she is busy mastering her piano skills, learning how to knit, and hanging out with friends and family. Her first and last year on the BANR committee was full of interesting conversations and previously unimaginable ideas.
Cynthia Van, sixteen, is a junior at George Washington High School. She enjoys rolling down grassy hills and writing poetry. Although she very much enjoys spicy food, she cannot handle it very well. This is one of the great struggles of her life. She aspires to skip through a sunflower field during a rainstorm. Is that too much to ask?
Grace VanRenterghem is a junior at Huron High School in Ann Arbor and this was her first year with BANR. She enjoys speaking in unison with her identical twin, like the twins in Harry Potter. She is also fond of drawing sloppy, crystal structures on her Spanish homework.
Hadley VanRenterghem is a junior at Ann Arbor Huron High School. This fall will be her second year with BANR. She moved to Ann Arbor this year from Grand Rapids and finds the weather much nicer here. She loves studying science, reading books, and watching sunsets on Lake Michigan.
Miranda Wiebe is a freshman at Carleton College. India.Arie is her role model, and nothing makes her happier than a good burger (with fries). She is incredibly grateful for the ways in which BANR has opened her mind over the past two years, and she hopes to continue to find ways to constantly redefine her perspective and opinions.
Very special thanks to Nicole Angeloro, Mark Robinson, Colin Corrigan, Matt Robinson, and Nora Byrnes. Massive thanks, also, to our intrepid intern, Charlotte Bhaskar, who provided essential help at every step of the way. And thanks to 826 National, 826 Valencia, 826Michigan, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Laura Howard, Andi Winette, Jordan Bass, Jordan Karnes, Casey Jarman, Brian Christian, Clara Sankey, Ruby Perez, Ian Delaney, Dan McKinley, Sam Riley, Sunra Thompson, Mimi Lok, Cliff Mayotte, Claire Kiefer, Alyson Sinclair, Gerald Richards, Lauren Hall, Olivia White Lopez, Jorge Eduardo Garcia, María Inés Montes, Bita Nazarian, and Molly Parent.
NOTABLE NONREQUIRED READING OF 2013
SELENA ANDERSON
Grief Bacon, Agni
LASHONDA KATRICE BARNETT
Hen’s Teeth, New Orleans Review
CHARLES BAXTER
Charity, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern
Z. Z. BOONE
The Buddy System, Th
e Adroit Journal
PHIL BRONSTEIN
The Shooter, Esquire
KATIE CORTESE
Lexa Flying Solo, Gulf Coast
JOHN P. DAVIDSON
The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2014 Page 40
