Meet the People Who Put Together the April Issue of VICE Magazine

This story appears in the April issue of VICE magazine. Click HERE to subscribe.

JUSTIN HEIFETZ

Justin Heifetz is an American freelance news reporter based in Hong Kong. Before settling there, Heifetz worked as a journalist for newspapers in the sweltering cities of Phnom Penh, Rangoon, and Bangkok. He now reports on crime, migrants, and gender issues in Hong Kong and the region. His work has appeared on CNN.com and VICE.com, for which he's recently covered black-market abortion, rising teen sexually transmitted infection rates, government-backed gay-conversion therapy, and sexually predatory beat cops. For this issue, he wrote about the abuses of foreign domestic workers forced to live with their employers in Hong Kong.

See THE HELP

LEWIS KHAN

With nothing but a camera and a bottle of rum, London-based photographer Lewis Khan set out to a small town in north Cuba to document the work, featured in this issue, of the day laborers who help assemble the structures used in the local Parranda, a carnivalesque street fair. Khan's work focuses on social issues and the human condition. Khan was a finalist in the AOP Awards 2016, was nominated for the Magnum Graduate Photographer of the Year 2016 Award, has exhibited at the Photographers Gallery, and was mentored by Danny Boyle following a win at Shuffle Film Festival for his film Georgetown.

See THE GUNNERS OF REMEDIOS

LAUREN OYLER

Lauren Oyler is a contributing editor at Broadly and a writer whose work has appeared in or on the Nation, Eater, Gawker, the Lifted Brow, and other places. She is co-author of Who Thought This Was a Good Idea?, Alyssa Mastromonaco's memoir about her time working for President Obama. Before working for Broadly, she lived in Berlin, where she worked as the online editor of the literary blog Bookslut, a copy editor for anyone who paid, and a babysitter for very cute twins. Her best party trick is being able to tell people, "I'm from West Virginia." For this issue, she profiled the poet Patricia Lockwood.

See ONE BOTTLE OF PEPPERMINT SCHNAPPS WITH PATRICIA LOCKWOOD

ROSS UFBERG

Many years ago, the owner of Abe's Kosher Deli in Scranton, Pennsylvania, told Ross Ufberg tales of the Hasidic Burning Man in Uman, Ukraine, an annual ecstatic pilgrimage to the burial site of a 19th-century mystic rabbi. This seemed as good a reason as any to commission an article; so for this month's issue, we sent Ufberg, a writer and literary translator, to report on it. Ufberg is also a co-founder of New Vessel Press, an award-winning publishing house that focuses on literature from around the world, and writes on the intersection of tech and design for BREAKGROUND magazine.

See UMAN, THE HOLY BIZARRE

SOFIA VALIENTE

Alligator wrestling—which involves poking the gators, putting your hand in their mouths, and generally antagonizing them until someone declares you the victor—is a dying art. Luckily for us, Sofia Valiente, a photographer and journalist based in Belle Glade, Florida, has documented it in this month's issue. Valiente received her BFA in art from Florida International University in Miami in 2012. Her book, Miracle Village, won the World Press Photo award for portraits in 2015. She is also a recipient of the 2015 South Florida Cultural Consortium Visual and Media Artists Fellowship.

See A PIT STOP IN ALLIGATOR COUNTRY