Henry Reichard

grew up on a sheep farm in rural Maryland and spent most of high school planning to
become a mathematician or a physicist. His plans changed in his junior year of college, when he
caught the writing bug from a highly contagious (and highly inspiring) creative writing
professor. He writes because words, chosen with enough care, are almost as true as – and
sometimes even more beautiful than – the mathematical equations he once studied in college.
“The mathematician’s patterns, like the painter’s or the poet’s, must be beautiful; the ideas, like
the colours or the words, must fit together in a harmonious way,” G.H. Hardy wrote in A
Mathematician’s Apology. “Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for
ugly mathematics.” The same might be said of ugly books or cumbersome sentences. Henry
plans to spend the next year in England, studying creative nonfiction at the University of East
Anglia.