Edward Droste (born October 22, 1978) is an American singer-songwriter and musician, formerly of the rock band Grizzly Bear. The group began as the solo effort of Droste with the release of 2004's Horn of Plenty, originally released on Kanine Records. All songs were written and performed by Droste. By 2005, the group expanded into a four-piece, with Droste still as a contributing songwriter. He left the group in 2020.
Claudia Miriam Gonson (born April 5, 1968) is an American musician best known for her work with The Magnetic Fields. She often provides the band lead vocals as well as performing the piano or drums. She is also the band's manager.
Gonson met Stephin Merritt in high school in the early 1980s, and the pair have worked together ever since.
While in high school at Concord Academy, Gonson performed in her first band, the Zinnias, in which Merritt wrote or co-wrote most of the band's material with John Gage. The band broke up when Gonson left to attend Columbia University. Gonson later returned to the Boston area to attend Harvard University, and joined the group Lazy Susan, which also included Therese Bellino and Shirley Simms.She has since performed on many of Merritt's albums, including the critically acclaimed 1999 album 69 Love Songs, and frequently appears with him live as part of the usual quartet that constitutes The Magnetic Fields.
Gonson has been Merritt's longtime manager. She appears extensively in Strange Powers, the 2009 documentary by Kerthy Fix and Gail O'Hara about Merritt and The Magnetic Fields.
As well as her work with Merritt, Gonson also plays drums in the band Tender Trap. She has written and performed her own music with Shirley Simms, Michael Hearst, Tanya Donelly and Rick Moody. She has also played drums in Providence, Rhode Island-based band Honeybunch and performs as the lead vocalist in Merritt's Future Bible Heroes project. She sang on Neil Gaiman's song "Bloody Sunrise".In an interview with The Advocate, Gonson remarked:
"When we started Magnetic Fields we purposely had one lesbian, one gay guy, one straight woman, and one straight man. The audience could identify with whomever they wanted."In that interview, Gonson noted that she feels that Merritt's songs are predominantly about "Loneliness, isolation, and the need to be recognized by another person." She believes that if homophobia were not so prevalent, these experiences "would be less rampant instead of being so associated with the gay personality." Gonson believes that many LGBT youth have listened to The Magnetic Fields for "words of wisdom".
In 2010, Gonson gave birth to her daughter Eve.
Julia Glass (born March 23, 1956) is an American novelist. Her debut novel, Three Junes, won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2002.Glass followed Three Junes with a second novel, The Whole World Over, in 2006, set in the same Bank Street–Greenwich Village universe, with three interwoven stories featuring several characters from Three Junes. Her third novel, I See You Everywhere, was published in 2008; her fourth, The Widower's Tale, in 2010; her fifth, And the Dark Sacred Night, in 2014; her sixth, The House Among the Trees, in 2017; her seventh, Vigil Harbor, in 2022.
Glass was born in Boston, grew up in Belmont, Massachusetts and Lincoln, Massachusetts, and attended Concord Academy. She graduated from Yale in 1978. Intending to become a painter, she moved to New York City, where she lived for many years, painting in a small studio in Brooklyn and supporting herself as a freelance editor and copy editor, including several years in the copy department of Cosmopolitan magazine. She lives in Marblehead, Massachusetts, with her partner, the photographer Dennis Cowley, and their two children, and works as a freelance journalist and editor, while teaching fiction writing at Emerson College. She is a previous winner of the William Faulkner - William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition.
Susan Minot (born December 7, 1956) is an American novelist, short story writer, poet, playwright, screenwriter and painter.