Spring 2009

Ted Conover is the author of Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing, Whiteout, Coyotes, and Rolling Nowhere. He is writer-in-residence at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University. His book on roads, from which his article in this issue is adapted, will be published next year by Knopf.

Rita Dove is a former US Poet Laureate (1993–1995) and recipient of the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for her book Thomas and Beulah (Carnegie Mellon, 1986). Her most recent poetry collections are Playlist for the Apocalypse (Norton, 2021); Collected Poems: 1974-2004 (Norton, 2016); Sonata Mulattica (Norton, 2009); and American Smooth (Norton, 2004). Dove is the sole editor of The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry (2011). Her other honors include the 2011 National Medal of Arts. She is the Henry Hoyns Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Virginia.