Sarah Cortez, councillor of the Texas Institute of Letters, has had poems, essays, book reviews, and short stories anthologized and published in Texas Monthly, Rattle, the Sun, Texas Review, Louisiana Literature, Arcadia, Midwest Quarterly, and Southwestern American Literature. She has won the PEN Texas Literary Award and the Southwest Book Award. Her most recent book is Vanishing Points: Poems and Photographs of Texas Roadside Memorials.
David Cole was born and raised in Los Angeles. His father, the doctor accused of killing Elvis Presley, delivered David in the building that is now the Church of Scientology headquarters. Things started out weird. And they'd get worse.
Described in the L.A. Times as a “meta-ideologue” (“an existentialist on a quest to understand how ideologues invent their realities”), Cole soon became involved in the controversy that exploded in the early ‘90s regarding the role and function of the Auschwitz concentration camp during the Holocaust, and the extent to which it was used for mass killings. Barely old enough to legally drink, Cole, who is Jewish, found himself appearing as an expert on the camp on such top-rated shows as 60 Minutes, Phil Donahue, Montel Williams, and 48 Hours. He was also interviewed in publications including The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and The Jerusalem Report.
In 1997, a $25,000 bounty was put on Cole’s head by the violent extremist group, Jewish Defense League. He changed his name and faked his death, emerging years later as filmmaker and respected conservative activist and author David Stein. As Stein, his work was carried by every major conservative organ in the U.S., including Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Fox News, Commentary, The Weekly Standard, the Breitbart sites, The Daily Caller, The Blaze, and The Washington Times.
Stein also ran one of the largest GOP party organizing operations on the West Coast, mixing congressmen, military leaders, and administration officials with rock and roll, pole dancers, and lots of liquor.
In 2013, Stein’s past as Cole caught up with him, when he was publicly “outed” by his ex-girlfriend. The story of his outing made headlines on The Huffington Post, Yahoo News, AOL News, The Guardian, Gawker, MSN, The Washington Times, and American Spectator, among many other sites and newspapers.
