Masha Gessen began contributing to The New Yorker in 2014 and became a staff writer in 2017. Gessen is the author of twelve books, including “The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia,” which won the National Book Award in 2017, and “The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin.” Gessen has written about Russia, autocracy, L.G.B.T. rights, Vladimir Putin, and Donald Trump, among others, for The New York Review of Books and the New York Times. On a parallel track, Gessen has been a science journalist, writing about aids, medical genetics, and mathematics; famously, Gessen was dismissed as editor of the Russian popular-science magazine Vokrug Sveta for refusing to send a reporter to observe Putin hang-gliding with the Siberian cranes. Gessen is a visiting professor at Amherst College and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, a Nieman Fellowship, the Hitchens Prize, and the Overseas Press Club Award for Best Commentary. Gessen is currently a New America National Fellow. After more than twenty years as a journalist and editor in Moscow, Gessen has been living in New York since 2013.
Send questions, comments and corrections to info@creativewritingmfa.info.
Disclaimer: No endorsement of these ratings should be implied by the writers and writing programs listed on this site, or by the editors and publishers of Best American Short Stories, Best American Essays, Best American Poetry, The O. Henry Prize Stories and The Pushcart Prize Anthology.