Jessica Bruder, Eric & Wendy Schmidt Fellow, is an associate adjunct professor at the Columbia Journalism School and the author, most recently, of Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century (W.W. Norton & Co., 2017). Her long-form narrative writing has appeared in WIRED, New York Magazine, Harper's, the Nation, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and many other publications.
Her upcoming book focuses on the tight-knit community of East Africans working at an Amazon facility in Shakopee, Minnesota. Most are Somali Muslims. Many are refugees. The book follows their rise to the forefront of the American labor movement, examining their struggles through the prism of race, immigration, economic inequality, and anti-Muslim sentiment in the modern American workplace.
Select Work:
- Driven to Despair: A profile of Doug Schifter, the driver who shot himself in front of City Hall to call attention to the plight of his coworkers, whose incomes were decimated by Uber and other ride-sharing services. (New York Magazine, 2018)
- CamperForce: A short documentary profiling Amazon's CamperForce program with hidden-camera footage from an undercover stint at Amazon's Haslet, Texas warehouse. (Adapted from Nomadland.) (Field of Vision, 2017)
- Snowden's Box: Two best friends become unwitting mules for Edward Snowden's leaked NSA archive. Epic weirdness ensues. (Harper's, 2017)
