Jessica Bruder

Type Media Center Fellow

Hailed by The New Yorker as “an acute and compassionate observer,” Jessica Bruder is the author of three non-fiction books including the New York Times bestseller Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century, which was translated into two-dozen languages and adapted into an Oscar-winning film. Nomadland tells the stories of 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 for themselves 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—and months living in a secondhand camper van nicknamed Halen. A New York Times Notable Book and an Editors’ Choice selection, Nomadland also won the Discover Award and was a finalist for the J. Anthony Lukas Prize and the Helen Bernstein Book Award. 

Bruder’s other books are Snowden’s Box: Trust in The Age of Surveillance, co-authored with Dale Maharidge, and Burning Book. Her stories have been featured on the covers of The Atlantic, WIRED, Harper’s and Audubon magazines and in the pages of New York Magazine, The Guardian, The Nation, The New York Times and other publications. 

Last year, Bruder was a Cullman Center fellow at the New York Public Library. She teaches narrative nonfiction at Columbia Journalism School and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

https://www.jessicabruder.com/

Books

Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century

Jessica Bruder

From North Dakota beet fields to California campgrounds to Amazon’s Texas CamperForce program, employers have found a new cheap labor pool: transient older Americans. Casualties of the Great Recession, they’ve taken to the road by the tens of thousands in a growing migrant labor community of “workampers.” Jessica Bruder hit the road to tell their eye-opening tale.

Snowden's Box: Trust in the Age of Surveillance

Jessica Bruder and Dale Maharidge

One day in the spring of 2013, a box appeared outside a fourth-floor apartment door in Brooklyn, New York. The recipient, who didn’t know the sender, only knew she was supposed to bring this box to a friend, who would ferry it to another friend. This was Edward Snowden’s box—materials proving that the U.S. government had built a massive surveillance apparatus and used it to spy on its own people–and the friend on the end of this chain was filmmaker Laura Poitras.

Thus the biggest national security leak of the digital era was launched via a remarkably analog network, the US Postal Service. This is just one of the odd, ironic details that emerges from the story of how Jessica Bruder and Dale Maharidge, two experienced journalists but security novices (and the friends who received and ferried the box) got drawn into the Snowden story as behind-the-scenes players. Their initially stumbling, increasingly paranoid, and sometimes comic efforts to help bring Snowden’s leaks to light, and ultimately, to understand their significance, unfold in an engrossing narrative that includes emails and diary entries from Poitras. This is an illuminating story on the status of transparency, privacy, and trust in the age of surveillance.

Burning Book: A Visual History of Burning Man

Jessica Bruder

It all began in 1986 when a pair of friends burned an eight-foot-tall effigy on Baker Beach in San Francisco in front of an impromptu audience of twenty. Two decades later Burning Man has evolved intoa dazzling annual extravaganza dedicated to radical self-reliance and radical self-expression, attracting nearly forty thousand people. These revelers — an eclectic mix of punks, geeks, families, ravers, grad students, gearheads, hippies, and tourists — turn the ancient lakebed of Nevada’s Black Rock Desert into a bustling city that exists for one glorious week before disappearing in a cloud of ashes and dust.

Burning Book is both a loving commemoration of the event’s storied history and an enlightening companion for festivalgoers. Bruder explores the unique ethos and breathtaking art installations that have shaped the event, along with Black Rock City’s distinctive landmarks, pranks, lore, and gift-based economy. Illustrated with more than three hundred stunning photographs, Burning Book is a striking tribute to an extraordinary cultural phenomenon for the legions who participate in Burning Man every year, and for those who haven’t become part of this unforgettable celebration — yet.