Contributors
Yuko Shimizu
Before Yuko Shimizu became an illustrator, she spent eleven years doing corporate public relations work in Tokyo. “I did like PR,” says Shimizu, who is now based in New York City, “but every time I hired illustrators for a job, I got jealous of them.” And now they have reason to be jealous of her: Shimizu won a coveted gold medal from the Society of Publication Designers in March, and her illustrations can be found regularly in, among others, the New Yorker, Spin, and Premiere. See the artwork she created for “Gone in 15 Minutes,” our story this month about the wildfires that destroyed the town of Ringgold.
Stephen Harrigan
During his prolific career, Texas Monthly contributing editor Stephen Harrigan has written about everything from a young politician named Henry Cisneros to an aging steakhouse called Brennan’s. Today, he’s famous for his fiction, and April marks the release of Challenger Park, a novel about the NASA shuttle program that is excerpted and reviewed this month. Harrigan pushes beyond the notion of astronauts as larger-than-life space cowboys and focuses on a wife and mother who is preparing for her first mission. “I basically had this proposition,” he says. “Here is this character who’s having second thoughts because her child is sick and her life is falling apart. I would ask people, ‘Is this plausible?’ And they would nod their heads fairly vigorously.”
Katharyn Rodemann
Senior editor Katharyn Rodemann may have grown up in Madrid, but American magazines are hardly foreign to her. “My grandmother was a librarian in Connecticut,” she says, “and every year she gave us subscriptions for Christmas.” This month, her magazine knowledge is on full display. In addition to revamping our events listings, Rodemann provided the vision behind our all-new Reporter section. “I wanted to create a destination,” she says, “a series of great appetizer pages for readers before they get to the features.” See for yourself, beginning with Topic A.
My Library
