Love and Work
Coming soon
Love and Work, the working title of a finished manuscript elaborating on Stephenson's manner of writing and documentary work, called "lyric research" by poet Ross Gay. Love and Work 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.
Don't Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You: A Memoir: Lucinda Williams (Ghostwriter)
June 2024
“To Sam Stephenson for doing all the dirty work and pulling all the parts together to mold this book into this wonderful final shape.” - Williams, “Acknowledgments,” Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You
“Lucinda Williams’s rise to fame was anything but easy... In Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You, Williams takes readers through the events that shaped her music... Raw, intimate, and honest, it is an evocative reflection on an extraordinary woman’s life journey.” - Crown
Love and Work: Lyric Research on Jason Molina
2019
“Love and Work is a meditation on the life and music of the Ohio born musician Jason Molina (1973–2013). In this new work, Stephenson uses his wandering, associative, perhaps even subliminal style to research and write about the late musician. Through piecing together various angles and elements from Molina’s life, conversations with family members and friends, and Stephenson’s inquiry into the strong relationship to workmanship in Molina’s songwriting practice, we get a unique look into his deeply poetic and haunting music.” - The Brother In Elysium
Gene Smith’s Sink: A Wide-Angle View
August 2017
“In 1997, lured by the intoxicating trail of people that emerged from Smith’s stupefying archive, Stephenson began a quest to follow his footsteps... Traveling across twenty-nine states, Japan, and the Pacific, Stephenson tracks down a lively cast of characters... The result of twenty years of research, Gene Smith’s Sink is a distilled and unprecedented look into the photographer’s beguiling legacy and the subjects around him.” - Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Audiobook narrated by Coleen Marlo.
Bull City Summer: A Season at the Ballpark (Editor)
May 2014
“Around a season of minor league baseball, Bull City Summer: A Season at the Ballpark brings together a team of artists and documentarians to find stories and images on the field and behind the scenes, presenting a microcosm of contemporary America engaged in a favorite pastime.” - Daylight Books
The Jazz Loft Project: The Photographs and Tapes of W. Eugene Smith from 821 Sixth Avenue
November 2009 / June 2023
“In 1957, Eugene Smith walked away from his longtime job at Life and the home he shared with his wife and four children to move into a dilapidated, five-story loft building at 821 Sixth Avenue in New York City’s wholesale flower district. The loft was the late-night haunt of musicians, including some of the biggest names in jazz... Smith’s Jazz Loft Project has been legendary in the worlds of art, photography, and music for more than forty years, but until the publication of this book, no one had seen his extraordinary photographs or read any of the firsthand accounts of those who were there and lived to tell the tales.” - Knopf (2009)
Dream Street: W. Eugene Smith’s Pittsburgh Project
2001 / June 2023
“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... In 2001, Sam Stephenson published for the first time an assemblage of the core images vfrom this project, selections that Smith asserted were the ‘synthesis of the whole,’ presenting not only a portrayal of Pittsburgh but of postwar America.” - W.W. Norton & Company (2001)
“This new edition, updated with a foreword by the poet Ross Gay, offers a fresh vision of Smith’s masterpiece.” - University of Chicago Press (2023)
W. Eugene Smith (Phaidon 55)
2001
"W. Eugene Smith (1918-78) is widely acknowledged as the 'master photo-essayist of his generation'. He declared that his mission in life was nothing less than to 'document, in words and pictures, the human condition'. 55 includes images from the landmark photo-essays 'Country Doctor', 'Pittsburgh' and 'Minamata', as well as other work from his massive legacy." - Phaidon Press