Russ Rymer (born May 17, 1952) is an American author and freelance journalist who has contributed articles to the New York Times , the Los Angeles Times , The New Yorker , National Geographic, Harper's, Smithsonian, Vogue, Los Angeles Magazine, and other publications.
His first book, Genie, a Scientific Tragedy (1993), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won a Whiting Award. [1] It was translated into six languages and transformed into a NOVA television documentary. His second book, about the American Beach community in Florida, was American Beach: a Saga of Race, Wealth, and Memory. [2] His third book and first novel, Paris Twilight, was published in 2013.
In 2005, Rymer became the editor-in-chief for Mother Jones , [3] holding the position only one year. [4] From 2011 to 2013 Rymer was the Joan Leiman Jacobson Non-Fiction Writer in Residence at Smith College. [5] He was the 2009-2010 Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. [6] He has been a lecturer in Writing and Humanistic Studies at the Graduate Program in Science Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism, instructor at the California Institute of Technology, and Distinguished Writer in Residence at St. Mary's College in Moraga, California.
Rymer was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2002. In 2012 he was awarded the Ed Cunningham Award for best magazine reporting from abroad by the Overseas Press Club [7] for his National Geographic report on the disappearance of languages. [8] He is married to the writer Susan Faludi. [9]
Susan Charlotte Faludi is an American feminist, journalist, and author. She won a Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism in 1991, for a report on the leveraged buyout of Safeway Stores, Inc., a report that the Pulitzer Prize committee commended for depicting the "human costs of high finance". She was also awarded the Kirkus Prize in 2016 for In the Darkroom, which was also a finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in biography.
Barbara Ehrenreich was an American author and political activist. During the 1980s and early 1990s, she was a prominent figure in the Democratic Socialists of America. She was a widely read and award-winning columnist and essayist and the author of 21 books. Ehrenreich was best known for her 2001 book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, a memoir of her three-month experiment surviving on a series of minimum-wage jobs. She was a recipient of a Lannan Literary Award.
Michael Cunningham is an American novelist and screenwriter. He is best known for his 1998 novel The Hours, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1999. Cunningham is a professor in the practice of creative writing at Yale University.
Mother Jones is a nonprofit American progressive magazine that focuses on news, commentary, and investigative journalism on topics including politics, environment, human rights, health and culture. Clara Jeffery serves as editor-in-chief of the magazine. Monika Bauerlein has been the CEO since 2015. Mother Jones is published by the Foundation for National Progress, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit.
Adam Hochschild is an American author, journalist, historian and lecturer. His best-known works include King Leopold's Ghost (1998), To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914–1918 (2011), Bury the Chains (2005), The Mirror at Midnight (1990), The Unquiet Ghost (1994), and Spain in Our Hearts (2016).
Ben Marcus is an American author and professor at Columbia University. He has written four books of fiction. His stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in publications including Harper's, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Granta, The New York Times, GQ, Salon, McSweeney's, Time, and Conjunctions. He is also the fiction editor of The American Reader. His latest book, Notes From The Fog: Stories, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in August 2018.
Geraldine Brooks is an Australian-American journalist and novelist whose 2005 novel March won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Steve Coll is an American journalist, academic and executive.
Susan Hahn is a bestselling Illinois poet, playwright and novelist. She is also a Guggenheim fellow.
Anne Fadiman is an American essayist and reporter. Her interests include literary journalism, essays, memoir, and autobiography. She has received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Current Interest, and the Salon Book Award.
Verlyn Klinkenborg is an American non-fiction author, academic, and former newspaper editor, known for his writings on rural America.
Tracy K. Smith is an American poet and educator. She served as the 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States from 2017 to 2019. She has published five collections of poetry, winning the Pulitzer Prize for her 2011 volume Life on Mars. Her memoir, Ordinary Light, was published in 2015.
Meghan O'Rourke is an American nonfiction writer, poet and critic.
Genie is the pseudonym of an American feral child who was a victim of severe abuse, neglect, and social isolation. Her circumstances are prominently recorded in the annals of linguistics and abnormal child psychology. When she was approximately 20 months old, her father began keeping her in a locked room. During this period, he almost always strapped her to a child's toilet or bound her in a crib with her arms and legs immobilized, forbade anyone from interacting with her, provided her with almost no stimulation of any kind, and left her severely malnourished. The extent of her isolation prevented her from being exposed to any significant amount of speech, and as a result she did not acquire language during her childhood. Her abuse came to the attention of Los Angeles County child welfare authorities in November 1970, when she was 13 years and 7 months old, after which she became a ward of the state of California.
Dagoberto Gilb, is an American writer who writes extensively about the American Southwest.
San Jose Mercury News West Magazine, also referred to as West and West Magazine, was a Sunday magazine published by San Jose Mercury News from 1982 to c. 1997. West Magazine received numerous awards and was recognized both for its articles and investigative journalism, as well as its art design.
Amy Wilentz is an American journalist and writer. She is a professor of English at the University of California, Irvine, where she teaches in the Literary Journalism program. She received a 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award for her memoir, Farewell, Fred Voodoo: A Letter from Haiti, as well as a 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship in General Nonfiction. Wilentz was the Jerusalem correspondent for The New Yorker, and is a contributing editor at The Nation.
When the circumstances of Genie, the primary victim in one of the most severe cases of abuse, neglect and social isolation on record in medical literature, first became known in early November 1970, authorities arranged for her admission to Children's Hospital Los Angeles, where doctors determined that at the age of 13 years and 7 months she had not acquired a first language. Hospital staff then began teaching Genie to speak General American English, and she gradually began to learn and use language. Their efforts soon caught the attention of linguists, who saw her as an important way to gain further insight into acquisition of language skills and linguistic development. Starting in late May 1971, UCLA professor Victoria Fromkin headed a team of linguists who began a detailed case study on Genie. One of Fromkin's graduate students, Susan Curtiss, became especially involved in testing and recording Genie's linguistic development. Linguists' observations of Genie began that month, and in October of that year they began actively testing what principles of language she had acquired and was acquiring. Their studies enabled them to publish several academic works examining theories and hypotheses regarding the proposed critical period during which humans learn to understand and use language.
Rita Nakashima Brock is an American feminist scholar, Protestant theologian, activist, and non-profit organization leader. She is Senior Vice President for Moral Injury Programs at Volunteers of America, headquartered in Alexandria, Virginia, and a Commissioned Minister in the Christian Church.
Karen Lehrman Bloch is an American writer and cultural critic.