Russ Rymer

In 2009, Russ Rymer will be Lecturer in the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies at MIT. For the last two years, he has been Visiting Professor of Journalism at the University of California's Graduate School of Journalism in Berkeley. In the fall of 2007, he served as Distinguished Writer in Residence at St. Mary's College in Moraga, California.

Formerly, Rymer was editor-in-chief of Mother Jones magazine, and executive editor of Portland (Oregon) Monthly. He has served as senior editor or staff writer for other national magazines and daily newspapers including Science ’86, a monthly magazine published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Hippocrates, and The Sciences, a magazine published by the New York Academy of Sciences.

Rymer has contributed articles to major magazines and newspapers, including The New Yorker, Harper’s, Atlantic, Smithsonian, Mother Jones, Vogue, Los Angeles Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, and The Strad. He has written two books. Genie—A Scientific Tragedy (HarperCollins, 1993) was translated into five languages and transformed into a NOVA television documentary, received a 1995 Whiting Writers Award from the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation, and was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award. American Beach—A Saga of Race, Wealth, and Memory (HarperCollins, 1998) was nominated for a Los Angeles Times Book of the Year Award for Researched Non-fiction, and named a New York Times Notable Book.

Rymer has lectured on topics in creative non-fiction and journalism ethics to classes and forums at a number of colleges, including Columbia University, University of North Florida, University of Southern California, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Barrett Honors College at Arizona State University, and Sciences Po Paris. He taught a core science-writing course at California Institute of Technology. He’s discussed journalism subjects in many media appearances, including “Fresh Air” with Terry Gross, “The Diane Rehm Show”, and “The Today Show” with Katie Couric and in addresses before such groups as the National Association of Science Writers, the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities, and the Commonwealth Club. The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation appointed him a Guggenheim Fellow in 2002.

He is currently at work on his third book, Out of Pernambuco, a history of the violin bow and the imperiled Brazilian wood from which it is made, to be published by Houghton Mifflin and Berlin-Verlag in 2011.