M. Gessen is an award-winning journalist, author, and translator who currently writes as an opinion columnist for The New York Times. Their writing focuses largely on LGBT rights and Russian autocracy. 

Gessen spent years covering Putin’s regime in Russia and was dismissed as the editor of the Russian science magazine Vokrug sveta after refusing to cover a Putin event they viewed as propaganda.

They have received numerous other honors for their writing and commentary, including the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Opinion Writing, the 2018 Hitchens Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship. They have written over 10 books, including The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia and The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin.

Gessen is a distinguished professor at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY and a distinguished writer in residence at Bard College.