Sam Stephanson
Sam Stephenson is a writer from North Carolina now based in Bryan, Texas. He is the author of Gene Smith’s Sink (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017) and two books, Dream Street: W. Eugene Smith’s Pittsburgh Project (WW Norton 2001) and The Jazz Loft Project: Photographs and Tapes of W. Eugene Smith from 821 Sixth Avenue, 1957-1965 (2009, Knopf), which in 2023 were published in new editions by the University of Chicago Press (with a new foreword by Ross Gay for Dream Street, Robin D.G. Kelley for Jazz Loft Project). Stephenson has won many awards, including a 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship in general nonfiction. He was the ghost writer for the 2023 memoir of musician, Lucinda Williams.
The writer Ross Gay used the term “lyric research” to describe Stephenson's book, Gene Smith's Sink. “It’s a sort of wandering and associative research, and in this way has as much to do with poetry as it does 'documentary' or 'nonfiction.' Lyric research is a capacious mode of seeing, which seems appropriate, given the book’s occasion is the photographer Gene Smith."