M. Gessen is an Opinion columnist at The New York Times and the author of eleven books, including the National Book Award–winning The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, the bestselling The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin, and Surviving Autocracy, their influential account of the Trump era. Gessen writes on political repression, L.G.B.T. rights, Russia under Putin, Israel/Palestine, and the global rise of authoritarianism; their 2016 essay “Autocracy: Rules for Survival” became essential reading in the aftermath of the U.S. election.
Gessen spent seven years as a staff writer at The New Yorker and has written for The Washington Post, Harper’s, The New York Review of Books, and Vanity Fair. They are one of the founders of the Russian Independent Media Archive (RIMA) and the first Distinguished Professor at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, with prior teaching appointments at Amherst, Oberlin, and Bard Colleges.
A recipient of the George Polk Award for opinion writing (2024), the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, the Nieman Fellowship, the Hitchens Prize, and the Overseas Press Club Award for Best Commentary, Gessen has lived in New York since 2013, following more than two decades as a journalist and editor in Moscow.
Gessen has served as a trustee and vice president of PEN America.