dedicated to building secondary schools in southern Sudan. Eggers is the founder and editor of McSweeney's, an independent publishing house based in San Francisco that produces a quarterly journal, a monthly magazine ("The Believer"), and "Wholphin," a quarterly DVD of short films and documentaries. In 2002, with Nnive Calegari he co-founded 826 Valencia, a nonprofit writing and tutoring center for youth in the Mission District of San Francisco. Local communities have since opened sister 826 centers in Chicago, Los Angeles, Brooklyn, Ann Arbor, Seattle, and Boston. In 2004, Eggers taught at the University of California-Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, and there, with Dr. Lola Vollen, he co-founded Voice of Witness, a series of books using oral history to illuminate human rights crises around the world. A native of Chicago, Eggers graduated from the University of Illinois with a degree in journalism. He now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife and two children. At an impressionable young age of eight or ten, Achak Deng sits at his father's feet in their home village of Marial Bai in southern Sudan, listening to his father's rendition of a Dinka creation myth. God has created a proud Dinka man and a beautiful woman, and now he offers them the idea of a cow to provide them with milk and meat and wealth. "You can either have these cattle, as my gift to you, or you can have the What," God tells the first man. "What is the What?" the man