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.

In 2026, Gessen was awarded the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Opinion Writing. They have received numerous other honors for their writing and commentary, including the George Polk Award, the National Book Award, the Leipzig Book Award for European Understanding, the Hitchens Prize, an Overseas Press Club Award for Best Commentary, and the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought.

Gessen also received the Guggenheim Fellowship, an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, and a Nieman Fellowship. They have written 11 books, including The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin, and The Brothers: The Road to an American Tragedy.

Gessen is a distinguished visiting writer at Bard College since 2020, and previously taught at Amherst College and Oberlin College.