Contributors

Helen Hudson Helen Hudson, MEd’94, has enjoyed a varied career: high school English teacher, songwriter, recording artist, actress, therapist, speaker and author. Her memoir, Kissing Tomatoes, which details the 13 years she and her husband cared for her grandmother with Alzheimer’s disease, was profiled recently in Counseling Today, and… Read More

Michael Burry Michael Burry, MD’97, studied economics and premedical training at UCLA before enrolling at Vanderbilt. He continued his medical education as a resident at Stanford University Hospital before leaving after his third residency year to found Scion Capital. Burry’s transition into the world of finance was eased… Read More

T.J. Stiles T.J. Stiles won the 2009 National Book Award for Nonfiction and the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Biography for his book The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt. Stiles, who is also the author of Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War, served as… Read More

Ridley Wills II Ridley Wills II, BA’56, has lived most of his life in Nashville. Since retiring from a 25-year career with the National Life and Accident Insurance Co., he has spent much of his life researching and writing local history. Heritage, Highballs and Hijinks: Colorful Characters I Have Known… Read More

C.F. Payne C.F. Payne’s artwork has graced the covers of Time, Reader’s Digest, Sports Illustrated, The New York Times Magazine, MAD Magazine, Der Spiegel, U.S. News & World Report, The Atlantic, Texas Monthly and more. He has been commissioned to paint countless politicians, authors and entertainers and has illustrated 10… Read More

Jonathan Marx A former journalist with 20 years’ combined experience as an editor, critic and reporter for the Nashville Scene and The Tennessean, Jonathan Marx is now publications manager for the Nashville Symphony. A Nashville native, Marx has maintained a side career as a musician and has recorded a dozen… Read More

Marshall Chapman Marshall Chapman, BA’71, is a rocker, songwriter, author, and contributing editor of Garden & Gun magazine. Her first book, Goodbye, Little Rock and Roller, was a 2004 SEBA bestseller. She’s recorded 11 critically acclaimed albums. In 1994 she endowed the first basketball scholarship at Vanderbilt. “It was important… Read More

Kevin Wilson Kevin Wilson, BA’00, is author of the collection Tunneling to the Center of the Earth: Stories (2009, ECCO/Harper Perennial). His fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, Tin House, One Story, Cincinnati Review and elsewhere, and twice has been included in the New Stories from the South: The Year’s… Read More

David Carlton David Carlton, associate professor of history at Vanderbilt, has devoted his career to studying the industrialization of the South. He is the author of Mill and Town in South Carolina, 1880–1920, which is still in print after a quarter century. More recently, he was co-author, with Peter A. Read More

Eric Etheridge Eric Etheridge, BA’79, grew up in Mississippi and has worked as an editor at several magazines, including Rolling Stone, The New York Observer and Harper’s. For his recent book, Breach of Peace: Portraits of the 1961 Mississippi Freedom Riders, Etheridge paired original mug shots with contemporary portraits, personal… Read More

Michael Lee Woodard Michael Lee Woodard, BS’90, came to Vanderbilt in 1978 on a football scholarship. In 1982 he left college to enter military flight training, later returning to complete his education. Woodard has spent his adult life involved in military flying all over the world and has also… Read More

  Lisa Robbins Lisa Robbins earned a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Missouri-Columbia and worked as a reporter in Jerusalem and Chicago. When a newspaper editor instructed her to stop conducting interviews in person and to do all her reporting from behind a desk, she decided to… Read More