The Personal and the Political: A Conversation about Writing with M. Gessen

Join the Tadler Center in welcoming Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist M. Gessen and memoirist Brittany Perham for a conversation about writing, politics, and resistance in a polarized America.

One of our most trenchant observers of democracy, M. Gessen is the author of eleven books, including the National Book Award-winning The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia and The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin. A Pulitzer Prize-winning Opinion writer at The New York Times, they have covered political subjects including Russia, L.G.B.T. rights, Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, and the rise of autocracy among others. They are currently at work on a biography of Hannah Arendt.

Brittany Perham’s memoir, Executrix (University of Georgia Press), won the 2025 AWP Sue William Silverman Prize for Creative Nonfiction. She is also the author of Double Portrait (W.W. Norton), which won the Barnard Women Poets Prize and was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award; The Curiosities (Free Verse Editions); and, with Kim Addonizio, the collaborative word/art project The Night Could Go in Either Direction (SHP). Her writing has received support from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the Hemingway House, the James Merrill House Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, the Wallace Stegner Fellowship Program, and Yaddo. She is an associate professor at Endicott College.