Sam Stephenson is a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow. He was also a judge for PEN America’s 2019 literary prize in biography. He has studied the life and work of photographer W. Eugene Smith since January 1997, following his footsteps in twenty-six states and Japan and the Pacific, conducting more than five hundred oral history interviews. Gene Smith’s Sink (published August 2017 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux) is the culmination of twenty years of work, often looking around the subject, distilled to spare essentials.

Stephenson’s new manuscript has a working title of Which Direction Home: Nonfiction Stories. It’s a further exploration of his writing and documentary style of looking rigorously off-center of a subject, called “wide-angle view” in the subtitle of Gene Smith’s Sink, and called “lyric research” by poet Ross Gay. Similar to Smith’s late cutting of Sink, Stephenson cut the new manuscript by 40% in the summer of 2019 to reach its finished form.

On June 30, 2019, Indiana Public Media/WFIU broadcast a one-hour interview with Stephenson that is an excellent overview of his work over the past twenty years, including discussions of new topics such as parenting and his new project on the band Jane’s Addiction 1986-1991.

A previous oral history interview with Stephenson was made public on the Outspoken Podcast in January 2018 by Cal. St. Fullerton’s Center for Oral and Public History. This interview contains unique discussion of his childhood and youth in coastal Washington, N.C. and his new manuscript.

Stephenson’s first Smith book, Dream Street: W. Eugene Smith’s Pittsburgh Project was published by W.W. Norton in 2001. In 2009 Alfred A. Knopf published his book, The Jazz Loft Project: The Photographs and Tapes of W. Eugene Smith from 821 Sixth Avenue (JLP).

JLP won a 2010 ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award, and a 2010 Innovative Use of Archives Award from the Archivists Roundtable of Metropolitan New York. For a dozen years Stephenson conceived and operated “The Jazz Loft Project” at the Center for Documentary Studies (CDS) at Duke University.

But Smith is not Stephenson’s only subject. In 2015 he won the ASCAP Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Prize for his documentary essay on John Coltrane’s first biographer, Dr. Cuthbert Simpkins, for The Paris Review, “An Absolute Truth: On Writing a Life of Coltrane.”

Also in 2015, he co-authored “Big, Bent Ears: A Serial in Documentary Uncertainty,” a joint venture between The Paris Review and Stephenson’s Rock Fish Stew Institute of Literature and Materials based in Durham, N.C. “Big, Bent Ears” was The Paris Review’s first foray into mixed media on this scale.

Periodicals that have published his work unrelated to Smith, or barely related, include The Paris Review, New York Times, Tin House, A Public Space, Oxford American, and Smithsonian. He won a 2001-2002 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. He curated exhibitions for both Dream Street and The Jazz Loft Project that had tenures at various museums such as the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, The International Center of Photography in New York, the New York Public Library, the Chicago Cultural Center, the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego, and the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke. He co-produced the “Jazz Loft Project Radio Series” with Sara Fishko and WNYC: New York Public Radio, and was a producer on Fishko’s 2016 film, The Jazz Loft According to W. Eugene Smith. He has been featured on NPR several times, the Leonard Lopate Show, NBC’s Today Show, CBS Sunday Morning, CNN, and the BBC.

Stephenson was the 2012-13 Lehman Brady Visiting Joint Professor of Documentary Studies and American Studies at Duke University and UNC-Chapel Hill, the culmination of fifteen years at CDS.

In April 2013 Stephenson formed the Rock Fish Stew Institute of Literature and Materials, a new platform from which to explore and experiment with documentary work. Rock Fish Stew’s inaugural project was Bull City Summer: A Season at the Ball Park, which concerns a season-long project to document the sights and sounds and stories at Durham Bulls Athletic Park, employing a team of writers, art photographers, and mixed-media artists. Photographers included Kate Joyce, Leah Sobsey, Alec Soth, Hank Willis Thomas, and Hiroshi Watanabe.

Which Direction Home: Nonfiction Stories is the working title of a finished manuscript elaborating on Stephenson's manner of writing and documentary work, called "lyric research" by poet Ross Gay. Which Direction Home contains research and writing about the musicians Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, and Joe Henry, the poets Betty Adcock and Claudia Emerson, writer Amy Hempel and avant-garde musician David Moore, writers Cormac McCarthy and Joseph Mitchell, artist Cy Twombly, musicians Liz Harris (aka "Grouper") and Jason Molina, and Virginia Wald, who was a teenager dating a heroin addicted saxophonist in the NYC underground of 1961. The manuscript blends autobiography with various types of documentary work in archives, oral histories, and field observations.

A TV series pilot set in 1959 in a Manhattan loft building which is an after-hours haunt of jazz musicians, most struggling.