Jessica Bruder is a journalist who writes about subcultures and social issues.

For her New York Times-bestselling book Nomadland, she spent months living in a camper van, documenting itinerant Americans who gave up traditional housing and hit the road full time, enabling them to travel from job to job and carve out a place in a precarious economy. The project spanned three years and more than 15,000 miles of driving — from coast to coast and from Mexico to the Canadian border. Nomadland won the Ryszard Kapuściński Award for Literary Reportage and the Discover Award. It was a finalist for the J. Anthony Lukas Prize and the Helen Bernstein Book Award. The New York Times named it both a Notable Book and an Editors’ Choice. The book has been translated into 24 languages and adapted into an eponymous Oscar-winning film.

Jessica is also the author of Burning Book and, with co-author Dale Maharidge, Snowden’s Box: Trust in the Age of Surveillance.

Jessica has been an adjunct professor at Columbia Journalism School and contributing to The New York Times for more than a decade. She has written cover features for The Atlantic, Audubon, Harper’s, The Nation and WIRED magazines. Her stories have also run in outlets including The Washington Post, The Associated Press, The Guardian, The International Herald Tribune, New York Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, Inc. and O: The Oprah Magazine. She has been a staff reporter at The Oregonian and The New York Observer and a senior editor at Fortune Small Business magazine. Her photography appears in Nomadland, Burning Book and Snowden’s Box, and has also been published by The New York Times, The New York Observer and Blender magazine.

Jessica has a B.A. in English and French from Amherst College and an M.S. in magazine writing from Columbia Journalism School. Support for her work has come from fellowships at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, Logan Nonfiction Program, MacDowell and Yaddo.

Going back further, she was a Starbucks barista, a snowboarder, an electric guitar nerd, a music store clerk, a junior camp counselor and a really lousy waitress. She is, eternally, a proud and patch-wearing member of the Madagascar Institute and the Flaming Lotus Girls.

She lives in Brooklyn with a dog named Max and more plants than you can shake a leafy stick at.