Russ Rymer

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.

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.

Rymer was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2002.

In 2005, Rymer became the editor-in-chief for Mother Jones, holding the position only one year.

He was the 2009-2010 Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.

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.

From 2011 to 2013 Rymer was the Joan Leiman Jacobson Non-Fiction Writer in Residence at Smith College.

In 2012 he was awarded the Ed Cunningham Award for best magazine reporting from abroad by the Overseas Press Club for his National Geographic report on the disappearance of languages.

He is married to the writer Susan Faludi.

His third book and first novel, Paris Twilight, was published in 2013.