Cryptic Crosswords from The Nation

Henri Picciotto is a mathematics educator who has taught elementary school for ten years, and high school for thirty. He is involved in teacher training (hundreds of workshops and presentations) and in curriculum development. He makes his ideas and creations available on his web site (www.MathEducationPage.org).

Even though his native language is not English, or perhaps because of that, Henri is deeply involved in word puzzles. He is a long-time member and past vice-president of the National Puzzlers’ League (NPL). He created dozens of variety cryptic crosswords in collaboration with Rebecca Kornbluh during a 20-year collaboration. Those were published in Word Ways, Dell Champion, Tough Cryptics, and in the NPL’s monthly, The Enigma. With Joshua Kosman, he edited The Enigma’s cryptic crosswords for 15 years. Together, they selected 45 among the best of those puzzles to include in NPL Cryptic Crosswords, a book they co-edited.

Joshua Kosman has been the classical music critic for the San Francisco Chronicle since 1988. A past winner of the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for music criticism and vice-president of the Music Critics Association of North America, he is a contributor to the New Grove Dictionary of Music & Musicians, 2nd Edition, and the New Grove Dictionary of Opera, and his writing has appeared in Gramophone, Opernwelt, Bookforum, and other publications. He blogs about music at pacificaisle.blogspot.com.

Joshua is also a longtime aficionado of cryptic crosswords and other word puzzles. Many of his cryptic crosswords were published in The Enigma, the monthly magazine of the National Puzzlers’ League, and in an all-too-brief synthesis of his interests, a couple of them appeared in Piano and Keyboard magazine. Together with Henri Picciotto, he co-edited The Enigma’s cryptic crosswords for 15 years and assembled the collection NPL Cryptic Crosswords, published by Random House.