Eula Biss, National Fellow, is the author of four books, the most recent being a critique of American homeownership titled Having and Being Had. Her book On Immunity was named one of the “Ten Best Books of 2014” by the New York Times Book Review, and her collection of essays, Notes from No Manʼs Land, won the National Book Critics Circle award for criticism in 2009. Biss teaches nonfiction writing for the Bennington Writing Seminars, a master of fine arts in writing program at Bennington College, and is a member of the Penny Collective, a communal workspace for writers. She recently edited a folio on the theme of ownership for the Yale Review. Biss is currently working on a collection of essays for Riverhead Books about the politics of land ownership in settings ranging from medieval England to contemporary South Africa. This book will explore how private property has shaped our lives and how we might reimagine property rights in the future.
Selected Work
- The Theft of the Commons: An essay about the origins of private property as we know it for the New Yorker.
- The Resistance: A piece for the Paris Review on white nationalism and the question of who can lay claim to a country or national identity.
- White Debt: An article concerning the literal and metaphorical debt that white Americans owe to Black Americans for the New York Times Magazine.
- No-Man’s-Land: Fear, Racism, and the Historically Troubling Attitude of American Pioneers: An essay for the Believer about a Chicago neighborhood with a long history as contested territory.