Editors
Robert Atwan
Robert Atwan has been the series editor of The Best American Essays since its inception in 1986. His reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Review, and The St. Petersburg Times, and his essays, criticism, and creative writing have appeared in The Atlantic, Broken Bridge, Denver Quarterly, Image, The Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, River Teeth, The Greenwich Times, and such professional journals as Research Communications in Psychology, Psychiatry, and Behavior, where he published a series of articles on dreams and divination in ancient literature. His many college anthologies and textbooks include The Harper American Literature; The Writer’s Presence; Thinking in Writing; America Now; and the award-winning Convergences. He is the co-author of Edsels, Luckies, & Frigidaires: Advertising the American Way and has edited seven poetry anthologies, including three on poetry and the Bible; a short story collection; The Best American Essays of the Century (with Joyce Carol Oates); and has contributed introductory essays to new editions of Hamlet and Julius Caesar. As a consultant to the Ford Foundation, he helped launch the Library of America series and he has judged the Associated Writing Program’s Award for Creative Nonfiction. In 1988, he traveled to Moscow as the American editor of Openings, which marked the first joint publication between the then Soviet Union and the United States. He served on the advisory board for The Encyclopedia of the Essay and is a contributing editor to Harvard Review and the photography magazine Aperture. A former host of a WBAI radio show in New York City, he lives in Milton, Massachusetts, where between 2003 and 2007 he was Director of the Blue Hills Writing Institute at Curry College and developed a popular writing seminar called The Nine Month Memoir. He is a visiting professor at Curry and can often be seen on their splendid courts playing tennis in all sorts of weather.
