Praised by the New Yorker as “an acute and compassionate observer,” Jessica Bruder reports on subcultures, economic justice and social issues. In her most recent book Nomadland, she documents the lives of itinerant Americans who gave up traditional housing and hit the road full time, traveling from job to job. Bruder follows her irrepressible protagonist, Linda May, and others from campground toilet cleaning to warehouse product scanning to the dangerous work of beet harvesting, and tells a compelling, eye-opening tale of the dark underbelly of the American economy.
“This extraordinary book maps the chasm between what America wants to be and what it actually is.”
—Katherine Boo, author of Behind the Beautiful Forevers
In a feat of immersive journalism, Bruder drove more than 15,000 miles — from coast to coast and from Mexico to the Canadian border — and spent months living in a secondhand camper van to get to know her subjects more intimately. Named a New York Times Notable Book and Editors Choice, Nomadland won the 2017 Discover Award and was a finalist for the J. Anthony Lukas Prize and the Helen Bernstein Book Award. Nomadland has been translated into French, Japanese and German, with forthcoming editions in Chinese (mainland & Taiwan). It has been adapted for a film of the same name featuring Frances McDormand and David Strathairn, directed by Chloë Zhao and with the anticipated release of fall 2020.
For over a decade, Bruder has been teaching narrative storytelling at Columbia Journalism School and contributing to The New York Times, where she was the founding columnist behind START, a blog profiling socially innovative startups. She has written for New York Magazine, WIRED, Harper’s Magazine, The Washington Post, The Associated Press, The International Herald Tribune, The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, The Nation, The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, Inc. Magazine, and O: The Oprah Magazine, Reuters and CNNMoney.com. She has worked as a staff writer at The Oregonian and The New York Observer and a senior editor at Fortune Small Business magazine.
Her long-form magazine stories have won the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism and a Deadline Club Award. Support for her projects has come from the Economic Hardship Reporting Project and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, where she was a 2016 literary arts fellow.
Bruder is also the author of Burning Book, a narrative non-fiction exploration of the annual Burning Man festival. Her photography appears in Nomadland and Burning Book and has been published by The New York Times, The New York Observer and Blender magazine.
Her recent work is about trust in the age of surveillance.
For more information on Jessica Bruder, visit jessicabruder.com.
