ANDRE DUBUS III
Andre Dubus III is the author of six books, including the New York Times best sellers House of Sand and Fog and The Garden of Last Days, and a memoir, Townie. His most recent book, Dirty Love, published in the fall of 2013, was a New York Times Notable Books selection, a 2013 Notable Fiction choice from the Washington Post, and a Kirkus Starred Best Book of 2013. Dubus has been a finalist for the National Book Award, has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Magazine Award for Fiction, and two Pushcart Prizes, and is a recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters award in literature. He lives in Massachusetts with his wife, Fontaine, a modern dancer, and their three children.
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GARY INDIANA
We first met Gary Indiana in 2011, when he mistakenly called our offices instead of the hospital where his friend was laid up after lung surgery. Since then we’ve struck up an unlikely friendship, in the sense that we still can’t believe we get to drink vodka with one of our favorite writers. You might be aware of any number of his artistic exploits—he’s a novelist, actor, filmmaker, artist, photographer, playwright, political essayist, and art critic—but it was his bitter, angry nonfiction that piqued our interest years ago. Also, if it weren’t for him, we’d never have read Two Serious Ladies. Gary’s memoir, I Can Give You Anything but Love, will be published by Rizzoli in 2015.
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DANIEL GENIS
Daniel Genis grew up in New York City and spent much of his youth listening in on vodka-fueled dinners attended by ex-Soviet writers and editors who talked fancy in his parents’ uptown apartment. His publishing career was on track until almost two years of heroin addiction changed everything. Genis became a “Sorry Bandit,” as one of the city’s tabloids memorably dubbed him, when he politely committed a series of robberies to pay off a crazed Ukrainian dealer in the Village. After kicking the habit and being clean for three months, he was spotted by one of his victims and spent ten years in prison. There, he met the Amityville Horror murderer Ronald DeFeo Jr., whom he wrote about for this issue.
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ROBERTO SAVIANO
Roberto Saviano is the newest VICE columnist, and the first one to be under 24-hour-a-day police protection. In his first book, Gomorrah, the then 26-year-old named names in a far-reaching exposé of the Camorra, the crime syndicate that runs Naples. The Camorra didn’t take kindly to that and threatened his life, leaving him with no choice but to live surrounded by the police. He’s still writing and still investigating criminal societies and economies (his second book, ZeroZeroZero, released last year, examined the worldwide cocaine trade), and in the coming months he’ll be educating us all about the underworld in a regular monthly feature we’re calling Crooked Men.
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JOSEPH SCOTT MORGAN
Joseph Scott Morgan began his career as a forensic investigator with the Jefferson Parish Coroner’s Office in New Orleans, eventually becoming senior investigator with the Fulton County Medical Examiner’s Office in Atlanta. Over the next 30 years, he participated in more than 7,000 forensic autopsies and made more than 2,000 next-of-kin death notifications before being forced to retire in 2005 due to PTSD. He’s now a distinguished scholar of applied forensics at Jacksonville State University, and an author—in 2012, he published Blood Beneath My Feet: The Journey of a Southern Death Investigator, a memoir of his career that won him the 2013 Georgia Author of the Year award.
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ROSE MARIE CROMWELL
Rose Marie Cromwell is one of our favorite photographers right now. That’s not only because she combines images with a mystical poeticism akin to Luigi Ghirri, or because her richly hued photographs reveal a part of the color spectrum too beautiful to be visible to the naked eye. More than that, Cromwell is invested in the effect globalization has on intimacy, and it’s because of this interest that she founded and continues to direct Cambio Creativo, an alternative arts-education nonprofit located just footsteps from the largest trade route in the world, the Panama Canal. There aren’t many photographers today actively and magnanimously doing good things for other humans, so this is truly a mark of distinction.
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Illustrations by Geffen Refaeli
