Jeff Porter is the author of Planet Claire: Suite for Cello and Sad-Eyed Lovers (Akashic Books 2021), Lost Sound: The Forgotten Art of Radio Storytelling, the memoir Oppenheimer Is Watching Me, and co-editor of Understanding the Essay. His essays and articles have appeared in several magazines and literary reviews, including the Antioch Review, Northwest Review, Shenandoah, Missouri Review, Hotel Amerika, Wilson Quarterly, Contemporary Literature, and the Seneca Review. When not writing, he is poking around with a camera documenting the strangeness of American life wherever it takes him, from Brooklyn, New York to Colorado’s San Louis Valley. He also makes films and experiments with sound. Three of his films have won prizes (The Men Who Dance the Giglio), have been broadcast internationally (Dublin, USA), and have been featured in art installations (The Watchtower). For the record, Porter grew up in Buffalo and to this day misses factories and his mother’s cuccidati. While in college, he enrolled in a Milton seminar taught by a tall caped poet who never once mention Paradise Lost or anything written before the 1960s. The experience was so bizarre and mystifying he decided then and there to become a professor. Porter has taught at the College of Charleston and George Washington University. For the better part of his career, he taught literature, comparative media, and creative nonfiction at the University of Iowa . Never once (what a shame) did he wear a cape or traipse about in a dashing manner. He hasn’t given up, though.