Masha Gessen is a Russian-American journalist who is the author of several books, most recently The Brothers: the Road to an American Tragedy (Riverhead, 2015), Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot (Riverhead, 2014) and the national bestseller The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin (Riverhead, 2012). Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, Slate, and many other publications, and has received numerous awards. Masha is the 2015 Andrew Carnegie Fellow. She lives in New York City with her family.

Follow Masha on Twitter at @mashagessen.