Wednesday, July 2, 2014

Editors Discuss Nonfiction


The Sewanee School of Letters is hosting “Stranger Than Fiction: Editor Panel on Nonfiction Writing,” at 4:30 p.m., Wednesday, July 9, in Gailor Audi torium. A reception will follow.

National Geographic writer and Virginia Quarterly Review contributing editor Neil Shea will lead a conversation on nonfiction publishing with editors Paul Reyes of the Virginia Quarterly Review, Leigh Anne Couch of the Sewanee Review and Bruce Falconer of the American Scholar.

Shea is a veteran journalist whose work—published in such venues as the Providence Journal, Foreign Policy, the Atlantic Monthly, the Christian Science Monitor and the American Scholar—literally spans the globe, often covering military or environmental issues. Shea has been embedded with U.S. troops in Iraq and interviewed a Taliban commander in Afghanistan; he has explored Mexico’s crystal cave, visited Madagascar’s remote stone forest and reported on shrinking sea ice in the Arctic sea. He has won gold and silver Lowell Thomas Awards for stories on Ethiopia and Cuba, and has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award and the Overseas Press Club Award. Shea has taught courses in journalism and nonfiction writing at Boston University and at Furman University.

Couch is the managing editor of the Sewanee Review. Her poems have appeared in the Western Hu- manities Review, Shenandoah, Salmagundi, Gulf Coast Review, Cincinnati Review,Carolina Quarterly and other journals. Her chapbook, “Green and Helpless,” was published by Finishing Line Press, and her first book, “Houses Fly Away,” was winner of the Zone 3 Press First Book Award. She lives in Sewanee with the writer Kevin Wilson and their sons, Griff and Patch.

Reyes is the deputy editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review (VQR) and is the author of “Exiles in Eden: Life Among the Ruins of Florida’s Great Recession” (2010). “Opportunity Knocks,” his essay about the Miami organization Take Back the Land published in the Fall 2009 issue of VQR, was a finalist for a Harry Chapin Media Award. Another essay about the housing crisis in Florida was a finalist for the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing. He is married to photographer and designer Ellen Reyes.

Falconer is the senior editor of the American Scholar, a national, general- interest magazine based in Washing- ton, D.C., where he assigns and edits nonfiction features and book reviews. He was previously a staff writer at Mother Jones and, for six years, an editor at the Atlantic. At the Scholar, he has worked with a broad range of accomplished writers.

As a writer, his work has taken him around the world—to Switzerland, where he wrote about the phenomenon of “suicide tourism”; to the re- mote Canadian archipelago of Haida Gwaii, site of the largest and most controversial “geoengineering” experiment in history; and to Chile, where he pieced together the story of Colonia Dignidad, a German religious commune that, in the 1970s, tortured and murdered political dissidents for Augusto Pinochet. 

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