The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas (23 page)

SIMON LE BON

Simon Le Bon is the lead singer of Duran Duran (www.duranduran.com). Since 1981, the band have had thirty UK Top 40 hits, including two number ones, and recorded twelve studio albums, three of which achieved multi-platinum status. In 1993 they were awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and in 2009 they headlined London’s Lovebox festival. Duran Duran’s latest album,
Red Carpet Massacre
, was released in 2006 on Epic Records, featuring collaborations with Justin Timberlake and producer Timbaland. Simon lives in London with his wife, Yasmin, and three daughters.

EVAN MANDERY

Evan Mandery (www.evanmandery.com) was born in Brooklyn, New York, and raised in East Meadow, Long Island. He is the author of two novels,
Dreaming of Gwen Stefani
and
First Contact (Or It’s Later Than You Think)
, and two works of non-fiction. His new novel,
Q: An Unlived Memoir
will be published by HarperCollins in 2011. He is currently writing a history of the Supreme Court’s treatment of the death penalty in the 1970s, to be published by Delphinium Books i
n 2012. Evan is a professor at the City University of New York. He is an avid poker player and golfer. He lives in Forest Hills, New York, with his wife, Valli Rajah-Mandery, a sociologist, and their three children.

ZOE MARGOLIS

Zoe Margolis is a writer and journalist, and a frequent contributor to the
Guardian
and
Observer
. Zoe’s blog, Girl with a One-Track Mind, won the Bloggie Award for Best British or Irish Weblog in both 2006 and 2007, was ranked twenty-fourth on the Most Powerful Blog in the World list by the
Observer
, and was named the World’s Most Famous Sex Blog by Nerve.com. The book based on the blog, also titled
Girl with a One-Track Mind
, is an international bestseller, translated into sixteen languages, and is being adapted into a screenplay.

CHRISTINA MARTIN

Christina Martin is a stand-up comic and comedy writer. She has been a regular feature writer for
Viz
since April 2006, and is the first female writer in the comic’s thirty-year history. She won third place in the 2006 Funny Women Awards, and has performed live stand-up across the UK. She has also written for Radio 4’s
Recorded for Training Purposes
, performed comedy for Radio 4 and B
BC
7, and writes regularly for
New Humanist
magazine. Christina likes playing Nintendo, monkeys, eating beef Monster Munch, and reading (books, not the place).

JENNIFER M
C
CREIGHT

Jennifer McCreight (www.blaghag.com) graduated from Purdue University in 2010 majoring in genetics and evolution, and is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Washington. During her time at Purdue, she founded the Society of Non-Theists, a student group for atheist and agnostics on campus, and acted as president for three years. She is on the board of directors for the Secular Student Alliance, and her popular atheist blog, Blag Hag, frequently covers topics such as atheism, religion, science, biology, academia, feminism, and sex.

CASPAR MELVILLE AND PAUL SIMS

Caspar Melville is editor of
New Humanist
magazine (www.newhumanist.org.uk). He formerly worked for openDemocracy. His writing has appeared in the
Los Angeles Times
,
Toronto Star
,
Sunday Telegraph
,
Village Voice
, and loads of obscure music magazines. His first book,
Taking Offence
, was published in 2009 by Seagull Books.

Paul Sims is news editor of
New Humanist
and is responsible for the magazine’s online content, including the website, blog, and podcast. He
graduated from Oxford University, where he studied modern history, in 2006, before moving to London to join
New Humanist
in 2007.

ANDREW MUELLER

Andrew Mueller (www.andrewmueller.net) is a journalist based in London, where he writes for
Monocle,
the
Guardian, Esquire,
the
Times, Independent, Uncut
, and
New Humanist
, among others. He is the author of the books
Rock and Hard Places
and
I Wouldn’t Start from Here
, and appears in the index of Richard Dawkins’
The God Delusion
in between Mozart and Muhammad, which strikes him as only fitting. He also sings and plays guitar in The Blazing Zoos, the ninth-best country band in the entire E2 postcode.

GRAHAM NUNN

Graham Nunn (www.grahamnunn.net) is the official designer for the Atheist Bus Campaign and its website AtheistCampaign.org, and produced the cover layout of this book. He also designed all the Atheist Bus Campaign merchandise, which can be purchased from Blue Apple Music. In 1997, Graham refused to make the switch from postal letters to e-mail, predicting, “The Internet will destroy the world.” He has now built his own computer, designed over thirty websites, learned HTML, Flash, Illustrator, and Photoshop, and, in the area of technology at least, vowed to stop worrying and enjoy his life.

PHIL PLAIT

Phil Plait is a professional astronomer, blogger, author, and president of the James Randi Educational Foundation (www.randi.org), an American non-profit organization devoted to promoting critical thinking across the world. He has dedicated his life to promoting real science and stamping out anti-science, from people who think the Apollo moon landings were faked to creationists who are trying to indoctrinate schoolchildren in the classroom. He writes about all this and more on his blog Bad Astronomy (www.badastronomy.com), hosted by
Discover
magazine (discovermagazine.com/bad astronomy).

NEAL POLLACK

Neal Pollack (www.nealpollack.com) is the author of several acclaimed books of satirical fiction and nonfiction. HarperPerennial published his latest book,
Stretch: The Unlikely Making of a Yoga Dude
, in August 2010. He lives somewhere in North America with his wife and son.

SIMON PRICE

Simon Price is the rock and pop critic of the
Independent on Sunday
newspaper. He has been writing about music for twenty-five years (starting while he was still a sixteen-year-old schoolboy in South Wales), including nine years at
Melody Maker
, which he left to write the best-selling rock biography
Everything: A Book About Manic Street Preachers
. He moonlights as a club DJ and promoter, running the glam night Stay Beautiful in London and the alternative eighties night Spellbound in Brighton.

CLAIRE RAYNER

Claire Rayner is a journalist, writer, and broadcaster, and is best known as Britain’s leading agony aunt. She was born in January 1931 in London and trained as a nurse, winning the gold medal for outstanding achievement when she became an SRN in 1954. Since the start of her writing career in 1960, she has written over ninety books, and in 1996 was awarded an OBE “for services to women’s issues and health issues.” She is a vice president of the British Humanist Association.

Claire married Desmond Rayner in 1957 and they live in North London. They have three children, three grandsons, and a granddaughter.

SID RODRIGUES

Sid Rodrigues (www.skepticsinthepub.org) works in a science laboratory, describes himself as “a lab monkey,” and has worked with pipettes, test tubes, and that three-prime, five-prime stuff since 1998. He lives in South West London, which, he concedes, isn’t quite as glamorous as Las Vegas, where he got married in July 2009 in front of the world’s skeptical community. Still, he flies to the States quite often to see his new wife, Rebecca Watson, creator of the female skeptical site Skepchick. He loves Camembert, science books, and, of course, Rebecca.

MARTIN ROWSON

Martin Rowson is one of Britain’s most acclaimed cartoonists. He has contributed to, among others, the
Guardian, New Humanist, Time Out, Independent on Sunday, Observer, Independent Magazine, Daily Mirror, Daily Express,
the
Times Educational Supplement, Tribune, Morning Star, Dublin Sunday Tribune
, and the
Scotsman
, and is the author of the book
The Dog Allusion: Gods, Pets and How to Be Human
, in which he likens pet keeping to following a religion. Martin is married with two teenage children. He lists his interests as cooking, drinking, ranting, atheism, zoos, and collecting taxidermy.

ADAM RUTHERFORD

Adam Rutherford is a professional geek. He holds a Ph.D. in genetics, works at the science magazine
Nature
, and presents radio and television programs, including
Cell
for B
BC
4: a series covering 4 billion years of evolution and 300 years of biology, intrigue, betrayal, and rather more sperm than is absolutely necessary. Writing for the
Guardian
’s blog Comment Is Free, his grouchy response to atheists being universally labeled as “intellectual cowards” briefly held the record for the most comments ever. He stopped claiming this as an achievement after he was soundly beaten by
articles by a Radio 1 DJ, a posh gap year student, and one about that godforsaken bus.

ANDREW SHAFFER

Andrew Shaffer is the creative director of Order of St. Nick (www.orderofstnick.com), the greeting card company whose irreverent cards have been featured on a variety of popular media outlets including
The Colbert Report,
the
Washington Post
, and NPR. He has a graduate degree from the University of Iowa, where he also attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop for a summer semester. He lives in Iowa with his wife. Shaffer’s first non-fiction book is
Great Philosophers Who Failed at Love
(HarperPerennial, 2011).

SIMON SINGH

Simon Singh (www.simonsingh.net) is an author, journalist, and director, who specializes in science and mathematics. He joined the B
BC
after completing a Ph.D. in particle physics at Cambridge University. He worked on
Tomorrow’s World
and then directed a documentary for the
Horizon
series on the subject of Andrew Wiles and his proof of Fermat’s last theorem, which won a BAFTA in 1997. He went on to write a book titled
Fermat’s Last Theorem
, and is also the author of
Big Bang
and
The Code Book
. His latest book is
Trick or Treatment? Alternative Medicine on Trial
, which he co-authore
d with Edzard Ernst, the world’s first professor of complementary medicine.

DAVID STUBBS

David Stubbs writes about music, TV, and sport for, among others, the
Guardian, The Sunday Times, The Wire, Uncut
, and
When Saturday Comes
. He was formerly a staff writer at
NME
and
Melody Maker
, for whom he created the Mr. Agreeable character (www.mr-agreeable.net). His most recent book is
Fear of Music: Why People Get Rothko but Don’t Get Stockhausen
from zerO books, which is all about why p
eople get Rothko but don’t get Stockhausen. He had a very good Catholic upbringing. He currently lives in Woolwich with his conscience.

CATIE WILKINS

Catie Wilkins is a comedy writer and stand-up comic. She’s gigged all over the UK at clubs including the Comedy Store, Comedy Café, The Stand, Banana Cabaret, Up the Creek, and The Komedia; appeared on the dvD of
Jimmy Carr’s Comedy Idol
; and performed in two Edinburgh shows,
Comedy o’Clock
(2008) and
It’s Got Jokes In
(2009). She has written sketches for The Works at Madame Jojo’s, and has a sitcom,
Nothing New Under the Sun
, in development with B
BC
3. Catie was born in 1980 and lives in London.

About the Editors

ROBIN HARVIE

Robin Harvie is an atheist, publisher and author of
Why We Run: The Story of an Obsession
. He lives in London, UK.

STEPHANIE MEYERS

Stephanie Meyers is a book editor and an avid believer in receiving presents, decorating trees, and making the most of post-holiday sales. She lives in New York City.

Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

Secular Resources

American Atheists
(www.atheists.org) is a nationwide movement that defends civil rights for atheists; works for the total separation of church and state; and addresses issues of First Amendment public policy.

The
American Humanist Association
(www.americanhumanist.org) advocates for the rights and viewpoints of humanists, striving to bring about a progressive society where being “good without god” is an accepted way to live life.

The
Foundation Beyond Belief
(www.foundationbeyondbelief.org) was created to focus, encourage, and demonstrate the generosity and compassion of atheists and humanists, and to provide support and encouragement for non-theistic parents.

The
Freedom from Religion Foundation
(www.ffrf.org) is an educational group working to promote the constitutional principle of separation of state and church, and to educate the public on matters relating to non-theism.

The
Secular Coalition for America
(www.secular.org) is an advocacy organization whose purpose is to amplify the diverse and growing voice of the non-theistic community in the United States.

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