As part of University Press Week Riverstone Books is delighted to host a virtual conversation with Sam Stephenson and Ross Gay
In this new edition of Sam Stephenson's Dream Street a vital piece of Pittsburgh's history, as captured by W. Eugene Smith's photographs, is brought to light. Stephenson will be joined by New York Times bestselling poet and essayist Ross Gay for a conversation about the work and its meaning.
In 1955, having just resigned from his high-profile but stormy career with Life Magazine, W. Eugene Smith was commissioned to spend three weeks in Pittsburgh and produce one hundred photographs for noted journalist and author Stefan Lorant’s book commemorating the city’s bicentennial. Smith ended up staying a year, compiling twenty thousand images for what would be the most ambitious photographic essay of his life. But only a fragment of this work was ever seen, despite Smith's lifelong conviction that it was his greatest collection of photographs.
In 2001, Sam Stephenson published for the first time an assemblage of the core images from this project, selections that Smith asserted were the “synthesis of the whole,” presenting not only a portrayal of Pittsburgh but of postwar America. This new edition, updated with a foreword by the poet Ross Gay, offers a fresh vision of Smith's masterpiece.
Sam Stephenson is a writer from North Carolina now based in College Station, Texas. He won a Guggenheim Fellowship for Nonfiction in 2019. He spent twenty years researching the life and work of photographer W. Eugene Smith, culminating in an unorthodox biography, Gene Smith's Sink, published in 2017. He was the ghost writer for the 2023 memoir of the musician Lucinda Williams.
Ross Gay is the author of four books of poetry: Against Which; Bringing the Shovel Down; Be Holding, winner of the PEN American Literary Jean Stein Award; and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. In addition to his poetry, Ross has released three collections of essays—The Book of Delights was released in 2019 and was a New York Times bestseller; Inciting Joy was released in 2022, and his newest collection, The Book of (More) Delights was released in September of 2023.