JoAnn Wypijewski

Professional History

1999 – present: independent writer, editor, political educator

1982 – 2000: editor (various positions), The Nation

As a writer, I have published in Harper’s, The Nation, The New York Times Magazine, the LA Times, CounterPunch, New Left Review, Elle, Il Manifesto, The Guardian of London and other publications and anthologies. From 2005 to 2007, I contributed a bimonthly column, “Signs Along the Road”, to Mother Jones, and since 2008 have written a regular feature for The Nation titled “Carnal Knowledge”. I also have a monthly column in CounterPunch titled “Diamonds and Rust”.

As an editor, I have shaped and restructured the manuscripts of other authors for magazines and books; co-edited an anthology; produced an edited volume of posthumous collected work; and created what The New York Times called “a wonderfully tricky work of art”.

As a practitioner of political education, I co-founded and have for the past fifteen years coordinated a summer seminar/retreat program in Vermont called Kopkind. I have also been a guest lecturer for classes at various colleges and universities (including NYU, Columbia University and its Law School, Hunter College, City College, Bard College, UMass Amherst), as well as a visiting fellow at the Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University.

At The Nation, I held the positions of copy editor, copy chief, managing editor and senior editor. In addition to production, assigning, editing and writing, I also edited two special issues: on the politics of sports; and on a century of politics, tracing the history of US liberal opinion through 100 years of excerpts from The Nation.

Currently, I am working on a book for Farrar, Straus & Giroux on America in a time of crack-up, exploring questions of progress and survival in a country absurd and on edge, seen from multiple angles while on the road in a 1963 Valiant convertible, a storied product of Detroit, itself trying to survive.

Books

Killing Trayvons: An Anthology of American Violence, co-edited with Kevin Alexander Gray and Jeffrey St. Clair, CounterPunch Books (2014).

Trampling Out the Vintage: Cesar Chavez and the Two Souls of the United Farm Workers, by Frank Bardacke, Verso (2011). Cut and shaped a manuscript double the book’s size into a beautifully wrought, sweeping history that is the essential work on the subject. Winner of the Hillman Book Prize, 2012.

Investigating Sex: Surrealist Research 1928-1932, edited by Jose Pierre, Verso (2011). Contributed the introduction to this new edition of the first English translation of the Surrealists’ recorded dialogues, “recherches”, on sexuality. A World I Loved: The Story of an Arab Woman, by Wadad Makdisi Cortas, Nation Books (2009). Reconceived and edited a rambling, picaresque memoir/diary of Lebanon and Pan-Arabism from 1917-1977 into a publishable book. Adapted for the stage by Vanessa Redgrave, 2012.

These United States, edited by John Leonard, Thunder’s Mouth Press/Nation Books (2003). Contributed the chapter on New York (Upstate), “Burden of Romance”.

Painting by Numbers: Komar and Melamid’s Scientific Guide to Art. Farrar, Straus & Giroux (1997); paperback, University of California Press (1998). Conceived and executed this book that is part catalogue, part statistical document, part public dream diary and in all an exploration of the crisis of modernism, the meaning of polls, the significance of landscape and the commodification of just about everything. Contributed its centerpiece essay and an interview with the artists, the latter reprinted in Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art, UC Press (2012).

The Thirty Years’ Wars: Dispatches and Diversions of a Radical Journalist, 1965-1994, by Andrew Kopkind, Verso (1995). Selected, edited and arranged this posthumous collected work.

Triptychs: Buffalo’s Lower West Side Revisited, photographs by Milton Rogovin, W.W. Norton (1994). Contributed the text, focusing on the history of the working-class neighborhood, including oral histories of the photographer’s subjects.

Selected Articles

“Vindication of Love”, CounterPunch, December 9, 2014 In memory of Bernard Baran, the first casualty of the 1980s day care Satanic abuse panic, wrongfully imprisoned for twenty-one years, dead at 49 after eight years of freedom; considering bravery and brazenness, the role of love and camp in a man’s refusal to be broken.

“Law & Order Liberalism”, The Nation, September 29, 2014 On the moral and political catastrophe of the American lust for prosecution and prison, and the role liberals, feminists and sex panics have played in fueling it.

“Strike!”, CounterPunch, September 24, 2014 (reprinted uncut on jeremybrecher.org) On insurrection and martial force; remembering the Great Upheaval of 1877, which concluded with the St. Louis general strike and its suppression, in light of events in Ferguson, Missouri.

“Where Shame Is Policy: Inside LA’s ‘Teacher Jail’”, The Nation, April 30, 2014 On the human toll of a school district disciplinary policy, its disproportionate application against black and older teachers and its utility in the strategy for school privatization. This was the first national story on what has now become a flashpoint issue for teachers unions.

“The Year in Sex (or Pop Goes the Weasel)”, The Nation, December 26, 2013 On the Zeitgeist via pop music, the selling of unfreedom as freedom and the dearth of feeling.

“Primitive Heterosexuality: From Steubenville to the Marriage Altar”, The Nation, April 9, 2013 On the seeming contradiction between presumed normalcy and deviance; considering the rituals of heterosexuality: marriage, but first courtship, and before that high school debauch.

“No Place Like Home”, The Nation, October 1, 2012 On the politics of nostalgia in the shadow of decline; a report from the Republican National Convention in Tampa.

“For Julian Assange, Justice Foreclosed”, The Nation, September 27, 2012 On bearing the dual brand Sex Offender and Terrorist, the subhuman beings of the twenty-first century; considering the political context that renders the reasoned application of law impossible.

“God and Cars”, CounterPunch, March 2012 On being stranded in Kokomo, where God is a mechanic.

“Reproductive Rights and the Long Hand of Slave Breeding”, The Nation, March 21, 2012 On the political limitations of “a woman’s right to choose”, as against the weightier, fundamental assertion of “a woman’s right to be”; considering legal scholarship on the Thirteenth Amendment and “the lost chapter of slave breeding” as avenues toward a contemporary, emancipationist argument around a woman’s personhood.

“A Soldier’s Story”, CounterPunch, December 1-15, 2011 (special issue) On returning from war to Fort Hood, Texas; one soldier’s insightful, confused, often profound assessment of his past and future prospects.

“The Body Acoustic”, The Nation, November 14, 2011 On retrieving human contact in an age organized for alienation; notes from Occupy.

“Weiner in a Box”, The Nation, July 4-11, 2011 On sex scandals as politics by other means; considering the tactics of Andrew Breitbart, the media’s obsession with Anthony Weiner and the politico-historical dimension of what’s “sick”.

“Elizabeth Taylor: What Becomes a Legend Most”, The Nation, April 18, 2011 On a woman who in her work and life represented the varied ways sexuality was being worked out, or not, in fantasy, commerce and ordinary life during the second half of the twentieth century.

The Upside of Censorship, The Nation, February 17, 2011 On the Smithsonian’s eviction of a David Wojnarowicz video; considering it as simultaneously a weasel act and a fine tribute to an outsider artist whose work was always intended to incite.

“Mongrel Politics and an American Mind”, Killing the Buddha, June 21, 2010 A Q&A interview outside a Tea Party rally, evoking one Southern white man’s psychic landscape of racial genetics, politics and conviction that Americans are “a lied to people, an insane people”. Widely reprinted; anthologized in At the Tea Party, O/R Books (2010).

“What We’ve Become”, The Nation, June 7, 2010 On the cold machinery of civil commitment; revisiting the case of Nushawn Williams.

“The Cargo Chain”, CounterPunch, March 1-15, 2010 On the worldwide circulation of commodities and the organization of workers essential to it, the network of ports, warehouses, transport hubs as global capital’s point of vulnerability; considering also the impact of hyperautomation and the financial crisis on the world’s dockworkers.

“Death at Work in America”, CounterPunch, April 29, 2009 On the unlamented death of 40,019 American workers killed on the job between 2001 and 2007, the demographics of death on the job and the woeful oversight of working conditions by OSHA. Reprinted in the International Journal of Health Services, Vol. 39, No. 4, 2009.

“Through a Lens Starkly”, The Nation, April 29, 2009; “Triangles”, July 1, 2009; “Sexual Healing”, September 9, 2009 Respectively, on how the adult obsession with ‘sexting’ has turned teachers, cops, judges and DAs into instant oglers of teenagers; on the curious unity of left and right when it comes to counting sins in a political sex scandal; on ‘female sexual dysfunction’, the invention of illness as a necessity for profit-driven health care, and the rustic science of bringing women off. All cited by the Sex-Positive Journalism Awards in honoring “Carnal Knowledge” as best column, 2010.

“The Final Act of Abu Ghraib”, Mother Jones, March/April 2008 On the conclusion of a legal and political drama so sordid that travesty was its only honest end: the trial and subsequent official erasure of a military court’s verdict and sentence in the case of Lt. Col. Steven Jordan, the highest-ranking officer charged in the most notorious scandal of the Iraq War. Finalist, National Magazine Award 2009. Finalist, Molly Award 2009.

“Postcards From Ohio”, The Nation, March 17, 2008 On the Democratic primary in Ohio as a referendum on the standard narrative of 1990s prosperity, the Clinton legacy; considering it also as a window onto the enlistment of white men into identity politics and an indicator of the Obama vote as a gesture to right the wrongs that have added shame on top of desperation. Summarized in a briskly circulated Video Nation interview.

“Is There a Left Here Left?”, CounterPunch, December 10, 2007 On the disequilibrium of movement to moment and despondency among US leftists; an open response, in the form of notes, observations, questions, to interlocutors at a talk given at the Political Economy Research Institute, UMass Amherst.

“Happy the People Who Don’t Need Heroes”, The Progressive, January 2007 On Steel Drivin' Man: John Henry, The Untold Story of an American Legend, by Scott Reynolds Nelson, and Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America, by James Webb. A review/essay on legends and the people who tell them; considering conditions of the black working class post-Civil War, and the bitterness and racist self-deceptions within white populism.

“Workless Blues”, New Left Review, November/December 2006 On Disposable Americans, by Louis Uchitelle. A review/essay on the underbelly of the US economy; exploring the consistency of layoffs, insecurity and indebtedness as features of working-class life since Reagan, and considering questions of acquiescence and community.

“Ecce Homo”, Mother Jones, May/June 2006 On art and God on a roadside in West Texas.

“The Army Slays Its Own”, CounterPunch, March 1-15, 2006 On the preventable death of a soldier injured during basic training, and the systemic physical and psychological abuses of injured soldiers warehoused in the Physical Training and Rehabilitation Program. This article spurred an investigation and subsequent front-page story in The New York Times, and (unfortunately limited) reform of the Army’s PTRP program.

“Judgment Days”, Harper’s, February 2006 On the trials of US soldiers accused of abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib, in Iraq; an extensive report, exploring also the matters of American accommodation to suffering, and of scandal as “normalcy raised to the level of drama”, to borrow A. Cockburn’s definition of accidents.

“Whitewash”, Mother Jones, November/December 2005 On the first US Truth and Reconciliation Commission, over the 1979 Greensboro Massacre; considering the KKK-Nazi Party-police collusion amid the ordinary history of race and class injury.

“A Failed State”, Mother Jones, September 18, 2005 On the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the abuse of God.

“The Days of Bread and Roses”, Mother Jones, July/August 2005 On the 100th anniversary of the IWW and the 50th of the AFL-CIO; considering the historical moment of mass insecurity, precarity, prison and war, and arguing for the reclamation of society.

“The Wreckage”, CounterPunch, November 2004 (Election Special) On Election 2004 reported from Ohio; arguing that organization, not values, character, policy or even ideological consistency, is what won it for the Republicans and lost it for the Democrats.

“The Passion of Father Paul Shanley”, Legal Affairs, September/October 2004 On the highest-profile sexual abuse case to rock the Boston Archdiocese in 2002. This was the only published thorough review of documents and the only extensive critical investigation of the media’s and prosecution’s joint narrative of the case, about which I wrote much subsequently.

“Lockdown Manhattan”, Mother Jones, September 3, 2004 On being arrested while reporting on protests outside the Republican National Convention.

“The Rainbow’s Gravity”, The Nation, August 2/9, 2004 On the meanings, twenty years after Jesse Jackson’s first run for the Democratic nomination, of that historic challenge, the response of the white party establishment and progressive institutions, told through interviews with people involved in the 1984 and 1988 campaigns.

“From a Tropical Paradise to a Nuclear Hell”, Los Angeles Times, March 1, 2004 On the fiftieth anniversary of the Bravo shot, America’s biggest, dirtiest nuclear test blast, and its deadly, studied effect on downwind Marshall Islanders.

“Black and Bruised”, The New York Times Magazine, February 1, 2004 On the uneasy relationship between blacks and the Democrats, as told from the perspective of three party activists in South Carolina on the eve of that state’s presidential primary.

“No Way Out”, The Guardian, December 13, 2003 On Random Family, by Adrian Nicole LeBanc; considering the question of why the stories of poor people in chaos are such valuable raw material, creating a frisson among the literary set, currency for just about everyone but the subjects themselves.

“The New Unity Partnership: A Manifest Destiny for Labor”, CounterPunch, October 6, 2003 On the draft program of unions that would force a split in the AFL-CIO by 2005. The first extensive airing and analysis of that program (with a link to the full, until-then secreted document), this piece was followed by an exchange with Tom Woodruff, executive vice president of SEIU, “Debating the New Unity Partnership”, also in CounterPunch, November 4, 2003 – all of these together demarcating lines that would form the basis of debate for the next two years.

“Labor in a Time of War”, New Labor Forum, Summer 2003 On institutional labor’s historic opposition to the Iraq War; arguing that labor’s weakness – its eviction from the role of accepted, or at least tolerated, junior partner within the establishment – is precisely what allowed it to follow the lead of its members.

“Labor in the Dawn of Empire”, CounterPunch, May 8, 2003 On May Day as a symbol of workers’ resistance to the war at home and abroad; remembering not only the Haymarket but also May 1, 1898, when US warships commenced the Battle of Manila Bay in the Philippines. An address given as part of the Hudson Mohawk May Day Festival sponsored by the Troy Area Labor Council (AFL-CIO), the New York Labor History Association, the Solidarity Committee of the Capital District and Eighth Step.

“Living in an Age of Fire”, Mother Jones, March 1, 2003 On the alleged terror cell in Lackawanna, New York, the constitutional and evidentiary problems with the government’s case, the history of the Yemenite community of Lackawanna and the silencing, fear-inducing effect of the prosecutions.

“This Is Only a Test”, Harper’s, December 2001 On American apartheid in Kwajalein Atoll, the Marshall Islands, site of the missile defense (‘Star Wars’) testing program; considering the dependence of this high-tech military contract outpost and program on a very low-tech imperial claim on space; reporting on the history of dispossession and the real conditions of the Marshallese, displaced and impoverished.

“What Workers Talk About When They Talk About War”, CounterPunch, October 2001 Conversations with workers after 9/11. Reprinted in Peace Not Terror, Lexington Books (2007).

“Audacity on Trial”, The Nation, August 6/13, 2001 On the background of race-baiting, labor conflict and police violence behind South Carolina’s effort to railroad five black longshore workers on felony riot charges and undercut the state’s most powerful union and black institution. This article was widely circulated in the national solidarity campaign that forced the state to reverse course and abandon its prosecution.

“Death and Texas”, The Nation, July 16, 2001 On one woman’s experience of being poor, Latina, married to violence and ruined via the Texas criminal justice system.

“Back to the Back of the Bus”, The Nation, December 25, 2000 On the state of Montgomery, Alabama’s transit system forty-five years after the beginning of the historic Montgomery bus boycott, a story of the silent return of transit racism.

“A Boy’s Life”, Harper’s, September 1999 On the Matthew Shepard murder; exploring sex, violence and heterosexual culture. This was the only early investigation to report on the role of drugs in the murder, to question the hate crime narrative and to examine the context of male fear in Laramie. Reprinted in Come Out Fighting: A Century of Essential Writing on Gay and Lesbian Liberation, Thunder’s Mouth Press (2001).

“Pounding Out a DRUM Beat”, New Left Review, March-April 1999 On Detroit: I Do Mind Dying, reissued and updated by Dan Georgakus and Marvin Surkin. A review/essay on this classic study of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers; considering the history of its theory and practice of urban revolution.

“The Secret Sharer”, Harper’s, July 1998 On the HIV panic around Nushawn Williams in Jamestown, New York, and the tangle of sex, race, poverty, danger and denial at its foundations; exploring also the criminalization approach to a public health problem. Widely reprinted.

“A Stirring in the Land”, The Nation, September 8/15, 1997 On the revival of social justice organizing beyond defensiveness or nonprofit development, toward addressing the distribution of wealth and power, told through interviews with organizers across the country.

“Blue Notes”, The Nation, May 26, 1997 On Willie King, a blues man in Old Memphis, Alabama, his struggle to keep the blues alive and to survive in a region that Clinton-era prosperity passed by.

“The De-Alignment of America,” The Nation, October 28, 1996 On The Inheritance, by Samuel G. Freedman. A review/essay on this saga of the rise of Reagan Democrats; considering the boomlet in liberal revisionism of the Sixties, the false dichotomy “race or class?”; arguing that the collapse of old electoral coalitions represents no neat realignment but rather fracture in response to the failure of conventional politics to confront prolonged crisis.

“Counter-Obituaries for Richard Milhaus Nixon”, Radical History Review, Fall 1994 On the underappreciated cost of Nixon’s “opening to China”, to wit the bleeding of Bangladesh. “Clinton & Labor: Reform Equals Rollback”, with Alexander Cockburn, The Nation, May 17, 1993 On death at the Staley plant and the fraud of labor reform mooted by Clinton and liberal allies.

“Pictures From an Exhibition”, The Nation, December 14, 1992 On Sex, by Madonna. A review/essay considering the matters of performance, photography, the pornographic imagination versus the popularization of sex, the manipulation of hip and the distinction between shock and daring in the late twentieth century.

“Buffalo Lost and Found”, The Nation, April 1, 1991 On The Last Fine Time, by Verlyn Klinkenborg. A review/essay considering the responsibility of the social historian, the problems of erasing conflict, romanticizing the past and writing in essences.

Political Education

1998 – present: co-founder (with John Scagliotti), program director and president of the board, Kopkind, a summer residency and public education/mentoring project for political journalists, activists and filmmakers, located in Guilford, Vermont; established as a living memorial to journalist Andrew Kopkind. Duties include helping to create the environment for thought and pleasure, establishing the theme for the political camp’s seminars, choosing mentors, calling for and selecting young participants (in consultation with a selection committee), setting agenda for the week’s discussions in consultation with mentors, participating in seminars (leading, facilitating or contributing), suggesting avenues for further reading/study, inviting guests to expand the arena of discussion through informal talks or screenings, organizing free public events (pertinent lectures and film screenings) and facilitating public discussion at those events, participating in film camp workshops (a collaboration with the Center for Independent Documentary), facilitating or organizing vivifying activities, cooking, fundraising, public relations, writing annual newsletter as well as funding appeals and calls for participants. 2006: producer, director and performer, choral staged reading of My Name Is Rachel Corrie, Marfa, Texas, mounted as part of a national campaign against the play’s censorship in New York; instigator and facilitator of local public discussion before and after the reading. 1984 – 2000: mentor to Nation interns; coordinating reporting teams, advising them on their own work, consulting with them for responses to my own, holding formal and informal seminars.

Other Professional Activities

Documentary filmmaking Assisted in writing narration for After Stonewall (1999) and Dangerous Living: Coming Out in the Developing World (2003), both by John Scagliotti; currently a research advisor for Scagliotti’s work in progress, Before Homosexuals. Conceived, researched and was a consultant to a television documentary Images of Atlantis: The Photographs of Milton Rogovin (1994), directed by Peter Wollen, produced by Bandung Ltd. for Channel Four’s “Rear Window” series in the UK.

Public speaking Participated in numerous writers’ panels, including but not limited to those sponsored by the New York State Writers Institute, the Narrative Journalism Conference at Boston University, the Gay and Lesbian Journalists Association, the Independent Press Association, the New York Metro Labor Press Association, the Internazionale Festival at Ferrara, Italy. Participated as a featured speaker or panelist in numerous cultural, political or academic arenas, including but not limited to the East/West Center in Honolulu, UCLA, Jobs With Justice’s annual national meetings, the Whitney Museum, the Buffalo Historical Society, Erie Community College, Brooklyn College, Princeton University, Nebraska Wesleyan, Columbia University, the Union of Radical Political Economists’ summer retreat, Kopkind, UMass Amherst, Texas A&M, Boston College, Real Art Ways in Hartford, Left Forum, the Texas chapter of the ACLU, emergency meetings in support of the locked-out Staley workers and the Charleston Five.

Television/radio Provided commentary on Court TV during the trial of Paul Shanley and following the trial of Aaron McKinney in the Matthew Shepard case. Appeared on ABC, CBC (Canada), the erstwhile Tom Snyder Show, GritTV and others, speaking on a variety of issues, from the news of the week to electoral campaigns to crime, panic and the death penalty. Likewise, I have done numerous radio interviews and call-in shows on a wide range of subjects in the US and internationally.

Editorial Member, New Left Review editorial committee (London).

Awards Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award (2011), James Aronson Award, career achievement in social justice journalism (2010), Lannan writing fellowship (2006), GLADD Media Award (2000).

Delegations

1991: member, Madre delegation of mostly women journalists to Cuba, there to assess the political and socioeconomic situation in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet bloc.

1991: international observer in Palau (formerly part of the Pacific Trust Territories), sent by the American Friends Service Committee to monitor a plebiscite on a proposed Compact of Free Association with the United States.

1988: international observer with the National Lawyers Guild delegation to Chile to monitor the historic plebiscite on the rule of Gen. Augusto Pinochet.

1985: member, Nation “fact-finders” delegation to Israel, the Occupied Territories and Jordan to assess the sociopolitical situation and prospects for peace.

Organizations

1980 – present: member, volunteer, now president of the board, Good Old Lower East Side (GOLES), a grassroots multicultural tenants rights and economic justice organization in New York City. My involvement began with an organizing campaign I initiated in my building, which ultimately secured legal status as rightful tenants and affordable rents for more than 100 people in the Lower East Side, put an exploitative apartment broker out of business and led to the establishment of the New York City sublet law. I have been on the board since 1982.

Founding member, New York City Labor Against the War, September 2001.

Founding member, US Labor Against the War, January 2003.

Education

Syracuse University, BS in journalism, minor in anthropology, 1978.