Masha Gessen is a journalist and the author of 10 books of nonfiction, most recently Surviving Autocracy. Their book The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia won the 2017 National Book Award for Nonfiction. Gessen is also the author of the national bestseller The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin (2012). Gessen is a staff writer at The New Yorker, a distinguished visiting writer at Bard College, and a professor at the Craig Newmark School of Journalism at the City University of New York. Gessen has served as a trustee and vice president of PEN America.
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