Jessica Bruder

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. renaissance. 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. The Los Angeles Times called her writing "quietly poetic."

Bruder has written for The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, CNN, the AP and other outlets. She worked as a staff writer at The New York Observer and The Oregonian, and as a senior editor at Fortune Small Business magazine. She also launched and edited CNNMoney's weekly Innovation Nation column.

Bruder received her M.S. and won a Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She earned her B.A. 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. Patchel Memorial Fund grant to study censorship in South Africa. This is her fourth year teaching at the Journalism School.