Russell Banks, INCA's current president, is a prolific writer of fiction, whose titles include Searching for Survivors, The Relation of My Imprisonment, Continental Drift, Affliction, The Sweet Hereafter, and Cloudsplitter. Banks has made a life's work of charting the causes and effects of the terrible things "normal" men can and will do. He writes with an intensely focused empathy and a compassionate sense of humor that help to keep readers, if not his characters, afloat through the misadventures and outright tragedies in his books.