March's Employees of the Month

HEIDI JULAVITS

Heidi Julavits is the author of four critically acclaimed novels (The Vanishers, The Uses of Enchantment, The Effect of Living Backwards, and The Mineral Palace) and co-editor, with Sheila Heti and Leanne Shapton, of the New York Times best seller Women in Clothes. Her fiction has appeared in Harper's, McSweeney's, and The Best American Short Stories, among other places. She's a founding editor of the Believer and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. She lives in Manhattan, where she teaches at Columbia University. She is, like, really, really into bathing. She is also very funny and easy to work with and just one of those people you cannot help liking a lot.

See READING HER GRANDMOTHER'S BOOKS, 1978

MEREDITH TALUSAN

Meredith Talusan's accidental journalism career began last April, when she came out as trans in a piece for the American Prospect. Since then she's published essays, opinion pieces, and investigative stories in the Nation, the Guardian, and Archipelago and has been a finalist for the Matter International Reporting Journalism Fellowship. Not bad for a nerdy immigrant from the Philippine province of Bulacan, which is near Olongapo City, where her first VICE story, about the murder of a trans woman by a US Marine, takes place. She's also working on a book of personal essays and, in her spare time, a comp-lit PhD thesis at Cornell on global poetry.

See HOW TO GET AWAY WITH MURDER

JAMES YEH

Now that James Yeh is the new culture editor for VICE.com, his parents have finally stopped asking him when he will apply to law school. Before working at VICE, he co-founded the literary magazine Gigantic, copy-edited a fashion blog, and Google-translated French and German for exorbitant rates. Prior to that, he sold knives. These days his fiction and nonfiction appear or are forthcoming in Tin House, the Believer, Bomb, Tank, Electric Literature, Noon, and the Paris Review online. A contributor to artist Cory Arcangel's Working on My Novel, he is still working on his novel. He's a native of South Carolina and still a little angry about that.

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GIANCARLO T. ROMA

Giancarlo T. Roma is a 2013 graduate of Columbia University with a degree in English and African American studies. He is the co-author of two books, Show & Tell (2002) and The Waters of Our Time (2014), both published by powerHouse Books. Having been a star shortstop in Brooklyn youth baseball, he has gone on to become an avid chess and guitar player, co-founder of an app called Clustr, and partial owner of the Green Bay Packers. Giancarlo is a regular contributor to VICE.com; his essay about his grandfather, the photographer Lee Friedlander, and the brilliant books he's put out during his career, is his first piece for the magazine.

See THE WHOLE PICTURE

HELEN HOLLYMAN

Helen Hollyman is editor-in-chief of Munchies, VICE's food channel, where she covers everything from the tasty to the unsavory. She says she recently ate a doner kebab that tasted like the Donner party. The Texas native is a former line cook, truffle dealer—the stinky fungus, not the chocolate—and host of the radio show U Look Hungry. She does not believe in consuming hot soup, sandwiches, or pretty much anything else on public transit. For this month's issue, Helen went to Asheville, North Carolina, to meet Michael Twitty, a chef who travels across the South educating diners about the role that enslaved cooks played in shaping Southern cuisine.

See MOUTH FULL OF SOUTH

JASON LAZARUS

Jason Lazarus is a Chicago-based artist, curator, and writer whose photographically related projects often lead to more questions than answers. He teaches at the Art Institute of Chicago, and his work has recently been the subject of major solo exhibitions at Kansas's Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, San Francisco's Contemporary Jewish Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. His ongoing project Too Hard to Keep collects photographs whose owners have deemed them too difficult to hold on to, and we're thrilled to publish a selection of them in this issue. He looks forward to your devastatingly sad submissions.

See TOO HARD TO KEEP

Illustrations by Geffen Refaeli