Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and National Book Award-winning author M. Gessen, one of the foremost contemporary writers on democracy, authoritarianism, and human rights, will visit Endicott College on Thursday, November 5, for “The Personal and the Political: A Conversation about Writing with M. Gessen.” Tickets are free and open to the public; advance registration is encouraged.
The event begins at 5 p.m. in Cleary Lecture Hall on Endicott’s Beverly campus and is sponsored by the College’s Tadler Center for the Humanities. Gessen will be joined in conversation by award-winning memoirist and Endicott Associate Professor of English & Creative Writing Brittany Perham.
Together, Gessen and Perham will explore the intersection of the personal and political and what it means to write about power, resistance, family, identity, and lived experience in a polarized America.
“M. Gessen is an extraordinary writer whose work demonstrates the power of storytelling to help us understand some of the most complicated forces shaping our world,” said Charlotte Gordon, Distinguished Professor of Humanities and Director of the Tadler Center for the Humanities. “Bringing M. together with Brittany Perham, another remarkable writer whose work draws deeply from lived experience, promises a fascinating conversation about what it means to write with honesty and courage.”
Gessen won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Opinion Writing for a collection of reported essays for The New York Times that examined authoritarian regimes throughout history and through personal experience. They are the author of 11 books of nonfiction, including The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, winner of the 2017 National Book Award for Nonfiction; Surviving Autocracy; The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin; and The Brothers: The Road to an American Tragedy, an account of the Boston Marathon bombers.
Born in the Soviet Union, Gessen has spent decades reporting and writing about Russia, Vladimir Putin, democracy, human rights, gender, and political power. Their work has appeared in publications including The New York Times and The New Yorker, where they previously served as a staff writer. Gessen is a Distinguished Professor at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York and a Distinguished Visiting Writer at Bard College. They are currently working on a biography of political theorist Hannah Arendt.
Gessen’s work has also increasingly blurred the boundaries between political reporting and deeply personal storytelling. Their recent five-part New York Times audio series, The Idiot, examined the story of a cousin convicted in a murder-for-hire plot and considers the limits of empathy and understanding when the subject of a journalist’s scrutiny is also a member of their own family.
Founded in 2018, Endicott’s Tadler Center for the Humanities enriches the intellectual life of the College and broader community through interdisciplinary programming, fellowships, special projects, and events featuring leading writers, artists, scholars, and thinkers. Its distinguished guests have included Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore; National Book Award winner and MacArthur Fellow Imani Perry; MacArthur Fellow and memoirist Kiese Laymon; Maid and Class author Stephanie Land; political theorist and author Danielle Allen; historian and author Martha S. Jones; and comedian, writer, and cultural commentator Roy Wood Jr.