John Jeremiah Sullivan and Joel Finsel

About

John Jeremiah Sullivan has lived in Wilmington, North Carolina, for almost twenty years. He has been writing for the Oxford American for even longer than that—twenty-five years, to be exact—his first piece, an interview with the late songwriter Vic Chesnutt, having appeared in this magazine’s pages in 1997. He is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a co-founder of the nonprofit research collective Third Person Project. His new OA column, “Fugitive Pieces,” gives space to ephemeral items that have turned up in his research.

Joel Finsel is the author of two books, one of which, a bartending memoir titled Cocktails and Conversations, was recently turned into a play by Theater Now in Wilmington, North Carolina. He is writing a book about the lost pharmaceutical history of the cocktail.