Employees of the Month

ERIN MEISENZAHL-PEACE

Erin grew up on a dirt road in the backwoods of the Florida Panhandle. That's where she cemented her belief that her home state is one of the weirdest places on Earth. She covers Sunshine State strangeness for VICE when she isn't in class at the University of Florida, where she majors in journalism and minors in Spanish and business administration. Erin is very accomplished for her age, but still naive enough to think that you should include your double minor in a bio. For this issue she wrote about Russian mothers in the US exploiting the system, a.k.a. seeking the best possible life for themselves and their children—however you want to look at it.

See MIAMI MATRYOSHKAS

DINA NAYERI

Dina is the author of the novel A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea. Her work has been published in more than 20 countries and recognized by Barnes & Noble's Discover Great New Writers, Best American Short Stories, Best American Nonrequired Reading, Granta New Voices, and the Center for Fiction. Her stories and essays have appeared in print and online at Marie Claire, Glamour, Granta, the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Guernica, the Southern Review, and elsewhere. Dina has a fake nose, and we're pleased to publish her essay about it and the beauty of all fake Persian noses.

See SHE'S SO NAJOOR

JOHN REED

John has written all sorts of things, from novels (A Small Still Voice, The Whole, Snowball's Chance) to mash-ups of Shakespeare plays (All the World's a Grave) to essays, criticism, and poetry that have been in places like Playboy, the Paris Review, and the Believer. He's contributed to VICE before (he did a history of the cockroach in 20th-century art for us a while back, and he once persuaded webcam models to read his sonnets out loud on camera), but the piece he wrote for this issue is the most personal, and disturbing, thing he's ever given to us. It's the story of how he thinks his grandmother poisoned, and maybe killed, their family members.

See MY GRANDMA THE POISONER

DAN ARCHER

Dan is a graphic journalist who uses comics to report on human-rights issues in situations where video or photographic equipment is inappropriate or, at worst, traumatic for those involved. Archer is a 2014 Reynolds Journalism Institute Fellow at the University of Missouri and was a 2011 Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University. His work has been featured on the BBC, American Public Media, and PBS, as well as in the State Department's 2013 Trafficking in Persons Report. His current project explores the crossover of interactive comics and virtual reality simulations, and for this issue he sent us an illustrated dispatch from Nepal.

See SARI STATE OF AFFAIRS

ARTHUR HOLLAND MICHEL

Nobody really knows where Arthur is from. His passport says he's British, his accent is vaguely Australian, he lives in Brooklyn, and yet he insists that he's Peruvian. A US immigration official recently described him as an "international man of mystery." Arthur enjoys writing, drinking seltzer, and rubbing his eyes. This past summer he got some scars on his face, but he's shy about telling people how that happened. He co-founded Bard College's Center for the Study of the Drone, a research, education, and publishing project. For this month's issue, he went to Peru to check out an open-pit mine in a city 14,000 feet above sea level.

See PIT CITY

ELLIS JONES

Ellis started at VICE as an intern and worked her way up to become managing editor. After five years with the magazine, she left last year to work for a stringent UK-based media company, but the job wasn't a great fit because Ellis likes to take leisurely lunches. She made a triumphant return to VICE in August and now serves as our executive editor, which means she can approve or kill any pitch with a one-word email, like YES or NO. The higher up you are, the shorter the emails you have to write—ask anyone. Ellis is a battleship. She'll bite your head off if you fuck up, and then she'll help you find a new head because she's also nice.

Illustrations by Geffen Refaeli