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.