She conducts extensive interviews, attends the workampers’ gatherings, and tests out survival tips, to the point where she makes “houselessness”-a lifestyle born out of necessity and compromise-seem like a new form of freedom, with its own kind of appeal. Bruder follows her subjects as they harvest sugar beets, work at Amazon fulfillment centers during the holidays, and act as campground hosts. Many among them have discarded “stick and brick” traditional homes for “wheel estate” in the form of converted vans and RVs and have formed a nomadic culture of “workampers,” evoking the desperate resourcefulness of those who lived through the Great Depression. This is her fourth year teaching at the Journalism School.Journalist Bruder ( Burning Book) expands on an article originally published in Harper’s where she examined the phenomenon of aging Americans adjusting to an economic climate in which they can’t afford to retire. Patchel Memorial Fund grant to study censorship in South Africa. summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa at Amherst College, where she was awarded the school's Laura Ayres Snyder Poetry Prize and an Alpha Delta Phi/David P. and won a Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She also launched and edited CNNMoney's weekly Innovation Nation column.īruder received her M.S. She worked as a staff writer at The New York Observer and The Oregonian, and as a senior editor at Fortune Small Business magazine. The Los Angeles Times called her writing 'quietly poetic.'īruder has written for The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, CNN, the AP and other outlets.

She writes Start, the New York Times blog on new indie businesses, and is the author of 'Burning Book' (Simon & Schuster), a narrative nonfiction account of the annual Burning Man festival in Nevada's Black Rock Desert. Jessica Bruder is an award-winning journalist whose writing focuses on innovation and creative thought, with an emphasis on contemporary subcultures and the D.I.Y.

Burning book jessica bruder