Keith Gessen

Keith Gessen (born January 9, 1975) is a Russian-born American novelist, journalist, and translator. He is a founding editor of American literary magazine n+1 and an associate professor of journalism at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. In 2008 he was named a "5 under 35" honoree by the National Book Foundation. Born Konstantin Alexandrovich Gessen (Russian: Константи́н Алекса́ндрович Ге́ссен), he was raised in a Jewish family in Moscow, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union. Gessen's mother was a literary critic, and his father is a computer scientist specializing in forensics. His maternal grandmother, Rosalia "Ruzya" Solodovnik, was a Soviet government censor of dispatches filed by foreign reporters; his paternal grandmother, Ester Goldberg, was a translator for a foreign literary magazine. In 1981, his family moved to the United States, settling in the Boston area. They lived in Brookline and Newton, Massachusetts. Gessen graduated from Harvard University with a B.A. in history and literature in 1998. He completed the coursework for his M.F.A. in creative writing from Syracuse University in 2004 but did not initially receive a degree, having failed to submit "a final original work of fiction."