Contributors

Susan Southard's first book, Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War (2015) received the Dayton Literary Peace Prize in Nonfiction and the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, sponsored by the Columbia School of Journalism and Harvard University's Nieman Foundation for Journalism, and was also named a best book of the year by the Washington Post, Economist, Kirkus Reviews, and the American Library Association. Nagasaki has been published in England, Spain, Denmark, China, Taiwan, and Japan, and excerpts of the book have appeared in journals around the world. Southard's work has also appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Politico, and Lapham's Quarterly. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Antioch University, Los Angeles, and was a nonfiction fellow at the Norman Mailer Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
Southard presents keynote addresses and lectures at international disarmament conferences, universities, and public forums across the United States and abroad. In 2016, she spoke before the United Nations on behalf of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), which won the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize.
Southard teaches graduate-level nonfiction seminars and has directed creative writing programs for incarcerated youth and at a federal prison for women outside Phoenix. She is the founder and artistic director of the Phoenix-based Essential Theatre, a professional company now in its 30th season serving marginalized communities across the Southwest.

L. Vaughan Spencer studied the Philosophy of Table Tennis and Anti-Social French at the University of the Isle of Wight and gained his MBA at the Jimmy Connors Institute in San Diego over the course of a weekend. Aside from holding motivational workshops in Watford, he also writes books; previous works include Chicken Nuggets for the Soul, Who Grated My Cheese? and What they don't teach you at Harvard Nursery School. All of his work is based on rigorous analysis – apart from when it's easier not to.

André Spicer is Professor of Organisational Behaviour at Cass Business School, City University, London, known for his thought leadership in the areas of the human side of work, leadership and ethics. He is widely published in both academic literature and the general business media and is a frequent commentator on sustainable business, behaviours at work and business culture.

Mark Solms has spent his entire career investigating the mysteries of consciousness. Best known for identifying the brain mechanisms of dreaming and for bringing psychoanalytic insights into modern neuroscience, he is director of neuropsychology in the Neuroscience Institute of the University of Cape Town, honorary lecturer in neurosurgery at the Royal London Hospital School of Medicine, and an honorary fellow of the American College of Psychiatrists.

Roy Sorensen never told you that he is the son of Ted Sorensen, President Kennedy's speech writer and confidant. For it is not true. Roy Sorensen is a professor of philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of Seeing Dark ThingsA Brief History of the ParadoxThought Experiments and Blindspots.

John von Sothen is an American writer living in Paris, where he works for Vanity Fair, Esquire and other magazines, does voice-overs for French luxury brands, and occasionally performs stand-up comedy (in French and English!). He lives with his actress wife Anäis, their children Bibi and Otho, and their dog Bogart, who has recently become a rom-com film star.

Siddharth Soni is the Isaac Newton Trust Fellow at the University of Cambridge, where he is based within Cambridge Digital Humanities (CDH). His research spans digital and computational humanities, post-colonial literature and critical archive studies. He also teaches modern and contemporary literature at the English faculty. His first trade book, Monstrous Archives won the Profile Ideas Prize for non-fiction in 2022.

Jessica Soffer was born and raised in New York City and earned her MFA in Fiction at Hunter College. Her work has appeared in Granta, The New York Times, Saveur, Wall Street Journal and Vogue, and she is the author of the novel Tomorrow There Will be Apricots.

Amanda Smyth is Irish/Trinidadian. She completed an MA in Creative Writing at UEA in 2000. Her short stories have been published in New Writing, London Magazine, and broadcast on Radio 4 as part of a series called Love and Loss. Her first novel, Black Rock [9781846687020], was published by Serpent's Tail in 2009.

Richard Smyth is a writer and cartoonist. He's a regular contributor to magazines including History Today, Bird Watching and New Humanist and his creative writing has appeared in Cent, Vintage Script, The Fiction Desk and The Stinging Fly.

Alan Sokal is Professor of Physics at the University of New York. In 1996 his infamous article 'Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity' parodying post-modernists' use of scientific terminology was published by the American journal Social Text in all seriousness.

Hannah Lucinda Smith is a writer, consultant and reporter for The Times and The Economist who has spent over 14 years covering the Middle East and the Balkans. A consistent Pulitzer grantee, she has also contributed to the Atlantic, Monocle, Spectator, Wired and TLS, among others, and has featured on BBC TV and radio. She is the author of Erdogan Rising and the co-writer of Zarifa. She is based in Istanbul.

Roger Smith was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, and now lives in Cape Town. Before turning to a life of crime, he was a screenwriter, producer and director.

Dr Kathleen Smith is a licensed therapist and mental health writer. She has written for popular publications such as Slate, Salon, New York Magazine, Lifehacker, Bustle, and Counseling Today, among many others. She completed her PhD in Counseling at George Washington University, and she teaches as an adjunct professor at Trinity Washington University and George Washington University. She also serves as an associate faculty member of Georgetown's Bowen Center for the Study of the Family.