Amy Alexander, a frequent Nation contributor, has been named an Alfred Knobler Fellow at The Nation Institute. Alexander’s most recent book, Lay My Burden Down: Suicide and the Mental Health Crisis Among African-Americans (2000), is written with Alvin Poussaint, MD. She is the editor of The Farrakhan Factor: African American Writers on Leadership, Nationhood, and Minister Louis Farrakhan (1998) and the author of Fifty Black Women Who Changed America (1999). Alexander has also contributed to NPR, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune Book Review, Black Issues Book Review, Essence and Salon.

Christian Parenti, who has reported for The Nation from Iraq, Afghanistan, Congo and Latin America, now joins our masthead as a contributing editor. He is the author, most recently, of The Freedom: Shadows and Hallucinations in Occupied Iraq (2004). His two previous books are The Soft Cage: Surveillance in America From Slavery to the War on Terror (2003) and Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis (1999). Parenti, who received a 2007 Stanley Foundation Reporting Award, has also contributed to The London Review of Books, Fortune, Playboy, Salon, the International Herald Tribune, In These Times and Mother Jones.

Welcome, Amy and Christian!