A New Editorial Board

In 2019, Image piloted a new editorial structure, with section editors selecting our content in poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, visual art, and culture (that is, books, music, film, television, and more). Section editors each draw on a team of advisors in their genres. This collaborative approach is already letting Image give readers a deeper, broader look at what’s happening now all across the world of art and faith.

Jamie Smith, editor in chief
Mary Kenagy Mitchell, executive editor

Poetry

Shane McCrae

Scott Cairns

Carolyn Forche

Katie Ford

Rowan Williams

Christian Wiman

Fiction

Editor | Melissa Pritchard

Silas House

Christopher Merrill

Dina Nayeri

Chigozie Obioma

Joan Silber

Jamie Quatro

Crystal Wilkinson

Visual Arts Advisory Editors

Editor | Aaron Rosen

Jonathan Anderson

André Daughtry

Nausikaä El-Mecky

Michael Takeo Magruder

Meaghan Ritchey

Dua Abbas Rizvi

Creative Nonfiction

Editor | Lauren Winner

Emily Bernard

Belle Boggs

Casey Cep

Lisa Ann Cockrel

Leslie Jamison

Beth Kephart

Tova Mirvis

Timothy B. Tyson

Culture Editorial Advisors

Nick Ripatrazone

Mia Chung-Yee

Ted Gioia

Joe Hoover

Phil Klay

Poetry Team Bios

Shane McCrae’s most recent books are The Gilded Auction Block and In the Language of My Captor. He has received a Lannan Literary Award, a Whiting Writer’s Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and a fellowship from the NEA. He teaches at Columbia University and lives in New York City.

Scott Cairns is the author of eight books of poetry, including The Theology of Doubt, Idiot Psalms, and Slow Pilgrim. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Paris Review, and elsewhere, and has been anthologized in Best American Spiritual Writing. His has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, among others, and is director of the MFA program at Seattle Pacific University.

Carolyn Forché, teacher, human rights activist, and poet of witness, has put into poetry some of the most devastating events of twentieth-century world history. Her many works include Gathering the Tribes, winner of the Yale Younger Poets award, and the anthology Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness. She is director of Georgetown’s Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice.

Katie Ford is the author of the poetry collections Deposition, Colosseum, Blood Lyrics, and If You Have to Go, all from Graywolf Press. She is the recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship and the Levis Reading Prize. She teaches creative writing at the University of California, Riverside.

Rowan Williams is Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge, after serving as Archbishop of Canterbury from 2002 to 2012. He has written on David Jones, Flannery O’Connor, Dostoevsky, and other writers, and has recently published Christ the Heart of Creation, a study in classical theological language. He has also published several collections of poetry and a couple of plays.

Christian Wiman is a poet, translator, editor, and essayist. A former Guggenheim fellow, he was editor of Poetry magazine from 2003 to 2013. His latest poetry collection, Once in the West was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award. His essay collections include He Held Radical Light. He teaches literature and religion at Yale University and the Yale Institute of Sacred Music.

Fiction Team Bios

Melissa Pritchard | Winner of numerous literary prizes including the Flannery O'Connor, Carl Sandburg, and Janet Heidinger Kafka Awards, Melissa Pritchard has won three Pushcart Prizes, appeared twice in O.Henry Prize Stories, and been the recent recipient of a Carson McCullers Fellowship. The author of ten books of fiction, she has published work in journals such as the Paris Review, A Public Space, Ploughshares, Ecotone, The Nation and O. As a journalist, she has traveled to Afghanistan, Ethiopia, India, and Ecuador, receiving a Best Journalism Award from The Atlantic. Her books The Odditorium, Palmerino, and a best-selling volume of essays, A Solemn Pleasure, were recently published by Bellevue Literary Press. In 2009, working with the Afghan Women's Writing Project, she established the Ashton Goodman Fund to support the literacy of Afghan women and girls.

Silas House is an American writer best known for his novels. He is also a music journalist, environmental activist, and columnist. His fiction is known for its attention to the natural world, working-class characters, and the plight of the rural place and rural people. His new novel, Southernmost, is winner of the 2019 Judy Gaines Young Award, and is long-listed for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction.

Christopher Merrill is an American poet, essayist, journalist, and translator. He serves as director of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. In April 2012 President Obama appointed him to the National Council on the Humanities. For Watch Fire, he received the Lavan Younger Poets Award. His nonfiction work includes Things of the Hidden God. His most recent publication is a memoir, Self Portrait with Dogwood.

Dina Nayeri fled the Iranian Revolution at age eight and lived as a refugee for two years before being granted asylum in the United States. She writes fiction and nonfiction on displacement, the refugee crisis, and Iranian diaspora. Her acclaimed Guardian Long Read “The Ungrateful Refugee” was one of the most widely read essays of 2017 and is now taught in schools across Germany. Her work appears in the New York Times, Guardian, LA Times, New Yorker, Wall Street Journal, Granta, and many others. Her first book of narrative nonfiction, The Ungrateful Refugee, is published in 2019.

Chigozie Obioma was born in Akure, Nigeria. His debut novel, The Fishermen, was a finalist for the Man Booker prize and Guardian First Book Award and won the inaugural FT/Oppenheimer Award for Fiction, the NAACP Image Awards for Debut Literary Work, the LA Times Art Seidenbaum Award, and a Nebraska Book Award. His work has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, Transition, The Guardian, New Statesman, New York Times, among others. His second novel, An Orchestra of Minorities, was published in spring 2019 and will be translated into eleven languages.

Joan Silber is the author of eight books of fiction, including Fools and The Size of the World, and the recipient of the 2018 PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story. Her latest novel, Improvement, is the winner of the 2018 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. She teaches in the MFA program at Sarah Lawrence College.

Jamie Quatro’s debut novel, Fire Sermon, was selected as one of the Top Seven Novels of 2018 by The Economist and is a New York Times Editors’ Choice. Her debut collection, I Want to Show You More, was a New York Times Notable Book and a finalist for the LA Times Art Seidenbaum Award, among others. Quatro is a contributing editor at Oxford American and a visiting professor in the Sewanee MFA program.

Crystal Wilkinson’s works include The Birds of Opulence, winner of the 2016 Ernest J. Gaines Prize for Literary Excellence. She is a recipient of the Chaffin Award for Appalachian Literature. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and her short stories, poems, and essays have appeared most recently in Oxford American and Southern Cultures. She teaches in the University of Kentucky’s MFA program.

Visual Arts Team Bios

Dr. Aaron Rosen is a curator, critic, and academic who has taught at Columbia, Yale, Oxford, and King’s College London. He is the author and editor of many books, including Art and Religion in the 21^st Century and the children’s book Journey through Art, translated into seven languages.

Jonathan Anderson is an artist and scholar whose research focuses on modern and contemporary art. His publications include Modern Art and the Life of a Culture: The Religious Impulses of Modernism (with William Dyrness). He is an associate professor of art at Biola University and is completing a PhD at King’s College London.

André Daughtry is an interdisciplinary photography and media artist, filmmaker, writer, social activist, and theologian of materials based in Brooklyn. He is community minister of the arts at Judson Memorial Church and regularly collaborates with dance and performance artists on various projects, from film to site-specific installations. He has his MFA in photography and media from Cal Arts and an MA in theology and the arts from Union Theological Seminary.

Nausikaä El-Mecky (PhD, cantab) is tenure-track professor in history of art and visual culture at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. She specializes in attacks on art, from the Stone Age to the digital era.

Michael Takeo Magruder is a visual artist and researcher whose work uses information-age technologies and systems to examine our networked, media-rich world. His art has been shown in over 280 exhibitions in thirty-five countries and has received extensive support within the UK, US, and EU.

Meaghan Ritchey was director of marketing at Image from 2019-2021. Prior to that she was the associate publisher of Commonweal, a magazine of religion, politics, and culture. She was the director of global community and public programs at International Arts Movement, based in midtown Manhattan with affiliate organizations around the world. There she helped to found The Curator. She adjuncts with Baylor University’s Film and Digital Media Studies Program in New York. Originally from West Texas, she moved to New York in 2005, living in the South Bronx for eight years before settling in Long Island City, Queens.

Dua Abbas Rizvi is a visual artist and art journalist based in Lahore, Pakistan. Since 2008, she has written regularly on art and culture for leading Pakistani newspapers, journals, and magazines. She also teaches studio and theory courses at her alma mater, the National College of Arts in Lahore.

Creative Nonfiction Team Bios

Lauren F. Winner’s most recent book is The Dangers of Christian Practice: On Wayward Gifts, Characteristic Damage, and Sin. Her other books include Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis and Wearing God. She is associate professor of Christian spirituality at Duke Divinity School.

Emily Bernard is a professor of critical race and ethnic Studies at the University of Vermont. A contributing editor at The American Scholar, she has received fellowships and grants from Harvard, Yale, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, among many others. Her first book, Remember Me to Harlem, was a New York Times notable book of the year. Her most recent work is Black is the Body, a testimony to racial experience across generations.

Belle Boggs is the author of The Art of Waiting: On Fertility, Medicine, and Motherhood. Mattaponi Queen, her collection of stories set along Virginia’s Mattaponi River, won the Library of Virginia Literary Award. The Gulf, her first novel, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press. Boggs has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts among others. She teaches in the MFA program at North Carolina State University.

Casey Cep is a writer from the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, New York Times, and New Republic, among others. Her first book, Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee, will be published by Knopf this May. A proud graduate of the Talbot County Public Schools, she has an A.B. from Harvard College and an M.Phil. from the University of Oxford, where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar.

Lisa Ann Cockrel curates conversations between writers and readers—in print, in person, online, and via multimedia. She is currently an acquisitions editor for Eerdmans with a focus on literary nonfiction. Prior to that she served as director of programs for Image Journal and director of the Festival of Faith & Writing. Cockrel holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars and has been awarded fellowships by both Bennington College and the Kenyon Writing Workshops.

Leslie Jamison is the author of the essay collection The Empathy Exams, a New York Times bestseller, and the novel The Gin Closet, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Harper's, and Oxford American, among others. A columnist for the New York Times Book Review, she teaches at Columbia University.

Beth Kephart is a co-founder of Juncture Workshops, a widely published essayist, and an award-winning instructor at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of two dozen books in multiple genres, including Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir and the novel Wild Blues. She has been named a National Book Award finalist and received a National Endowment for the Arts grant, among other honors.

Tova Mirvis is the author of three novels, including The Ladies Auxiliary, a national bestseller. Her essays have appeared in various anthologies and newspapers including the Boston Globe Magazine. She has been a scholar in residence at the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute at Brandeis University. Her most recent work is a memoir, The Book of Separation, a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice.

Timothy B. Tyson, writer and historian, is a senior research scholar at Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies, among other posts. He serves on the executive board of the North Carolina NAACP and the UNC Center for Civil Rights. His works include the New York Times bestseller The Blood of Emmett Till and Radio Free Dixie, winner of the James Rawley Prize for the best book on race and the basis for the documentary Negroes with Guns.

Culture Team Bios

Nick Ripatrazone writes about poetry, religion, film, books, culture, and sports for Rolling Stone, GQ, The Atlantic, Paris Review, Esquire, Literary Hub, Sewanee Review, Commonweal, Kenyon Review, America, Image, and other publications, and is a contributing editor at The Millions. He is working on a book about faith and doubt in fiction for Fortress Press.

Pianist Mia Chung-Yee has appeared with the Alabama, Baltimore, Harrisburg, National, and New Haven symphonies; the Boston Pops; and the Seoul Philharmonic, and has performed in the Kennedy Center, Amsterdam Concertgebouw, Carnegie Hall, Boston’s Symphony Hall and Jordan Hall, Seoul’s Sejong Art Center, and Lincoln Center. Her recordings of Bach, Beethoven, Schumann, and Lee Hyla have earned high praise and awards. She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard and received a master's from Yale and a doctorate from Juilliard. She taught at Gordon College for twenty years before joining the faculty at the Curtis Institute of Music in 2012.

Ted Gioia is a leading music historian and the author of eleven books, including The History of Jazz, Delta Blues, and the forthcoming Music: A Subversive History. His books have been translated into eight languages and two have been honored on the New York Times annual list of notable books. A professional pianist, recording artist, record producer, and music educator, he previously served on the faculty of Stanford University.

Joe Hoover is a playwright and actor and founder of Xavier Theatre and Film. He also works as poetry editor of America Media and as a drama teacher at Brooklyn Jesuit Prep. His essays have been published in The Cresset, The Sun, and Best Spiritual Writing 2012. He is a Jesuit brother.

Phil Klay, a Dartmouth grad and veteran of the US Marine Corps, has written and spoken extensively on military life, social issues, and Catholic faith. After serving in Iraq from 2007 to 2008, he received his MFA from Hunter College. His collection of short stories, Redeployment, won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2014, among other honors.

Current Issue