She's the daughter of an English professor and majored in English herself, but LUCY SANKEY RUSSELL, '82, didn't try writing until about five years ago. She had left her job as a government regulatory lawyer to stay home with her first child. "I was interested in the daily experiences of family life that parents generally are too busy to record," she says. "Along the way, I discovered the short personal essay, and I started experimenting with humor." Her first published piece was an Endnotes essay in the July/August 1996 issue of Stanford. Since then, she's written for the Washington Post and the Charlottesville Weekly. Russell returns to these pages with a modest proposal on bedtime reading. She lives in Charlottesville, Va., with her husband, Ed, '80, and their two children.
You might say JESSE OXFELD, '98, had all the background he needed to profile Tony award-winning playwright Warren Leight, '77. Growing up in South Orange, N.J., Oxfeld saw his first Broadway show at 4 and was hooked. At Stanford, he recalls, "I was the only student in the Cedro lounge watching the Tonys." Also in this issue, Oxfeld writes about Ken Prewitt, PhD '63, director of the U.S. Census Bureau. A former Stanford intern, Oxfeld now lives in New York City, where he's an assistant editor at Brill's Content, the monthly media-watchdog magazine.
Sometimes the hardest part of reporting a story is tracking down your sources. For MARC PEYSER, finding film producer David Brown, '36, was simple: he got in the elevator and pressed 4. That the two work in the same Manhattan building (Peyser for Newsweek, Brown for his own production company) was the first of many pleasant surprises for the writer. "You'd never guess the man is 83," says Peyser. "He has more energy than I do." Brown told Peyser tales from Hollywood and confessed his obsession with following the stock market on cable TV. For his part, Peyser, '86, follows lifestyle and the arts for Newsweek, where he landed in 1989 after getting a master's in journalism from Columbia and working two years at the Red Bank Register in New Jersey.
Photographer GLENN MATSUMURA first got a call from Stanford back in 1992 to shoot incoming president Gerhard Casper. Away on another assignment that day, Matsumura missed repeated messages -- and a chance for the cover. "Right after that, I bought a pager," he says. Since then, he's become a regular contributor. His work in this issue includes a portrait of entrepreneur Sabeer Bhatia, MS '93 and a shot of geophysics professor Mark Zoback, MS '73, PhD '75. He also captured a Memorial Church wedding scene for 1,000 Words. When he's not working for us, Matsumura focuses on advertising. His clients include Mercedes-Benz, Anheuser-Busch and "all levels of the high-tech food chain."
