Jessica Bruder is a non-fiction writer. She specializes in immersion journalism, with a focus on subcultures and social issues.

Her New York Times-bestselling book Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century has been published in 24 languages. It was adapted into a film, also called Nomadland, that won three Oscars and starred Frances McDormand alongside many of the people Bruder wrote about in her book, who acted out fictionalized versions of their real-life stories.

To write Nomadland, Jess 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—along with stints working undercover at Amazon’s Camperforce program and the annual sugar beet harvest.

Nomadland was the first American book to win the Ryszard Kapuściński Award for Literary Reportage. It also won the Discover Award and 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.

Jess is also the author of Burning Book and, with co-author Dale Maharidge, Snowden’s Box: Trust in the Age of Surveillance. She is currently working on a book about mutual aid and abortion access.

Jess 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.

Jess has a B.A. in English and French from Amherst College and an M.S. in magazine writing from Columbia Journalism School. Her work has been generously supported by fellowships at The New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, MacDowell, Yaddo and the Logan Nonfiction Program.

Going back further, Jess 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.

Jess lives in Brooklyn with her partner and more plants than you can shake a leafy stick at. While she hates writing about herself in the third person, she will do so in the interest of making a decent impression. (If you’ve read this far, well…did it work?)