Boris Fishman

Boris Fishman was born in Minsk, in the former Soviet Union, in 1979, and emigrated to the United States in 1988. His journalism, essays, and criticism have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine and Book Review, The New Republic, The Nation, Harpers, Vogue, The London Review of Books, The Wall Street Journal and other publications (see Selected Journalism).

Boris received a degree in Russian literature from Princeton University. Afterward, he was on the editorial staff of The New Yorker; edited Wild East: Stories from the Last Frontier (Random House), a collection of short stories about the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the early post-Communist years; received a Fulbright research grant to Istanbul, Turkey; and co-wrote and edited the U. S. Senates report on Hurricane Katrina.

Boris received his MFA in fiction from New York University, where he was a New York Times Foundation Fellow. Since then, he has received residencies and fellowships from the New York Foundation of the Arts; the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Mass.; Mesa Refuge and Djerassi Resident Artist Program in northern California; the Edward Albee Foundation in Montauk; the Wildacres Retreat in North Carolina; the Blue Mountain Center in the Adirondacks; and the Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts in Wyoming, among others. To support his writing, Boris has worked as a hiking guide, a farm laborer, a market researcher for a maker of temporary concrete, an editor, a fact-checker, and the editorial director of a tech start-up.