Boris Fishman

About

Boris FishmanBoris 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, Harper’s, Vogue, The London Review of Books, The Wall Street Journal and other publications (see Articles), as well as in anthologies and works by others. (See Miscellany.)

Boris received a degree in Russian literature from Princeton University in 2001. Between 2001 and 2004, he was on the editorial staff of The New Yorker. In 2003, he 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. In 2004, he received the Simon Rockower Award for Excellence in Arts & Criticism, from the American Jewish Press Association, for “The Flaunted Necklace” (Forward, November 28, 2003; see Articles). In 2005, Boris received a Fulbright research grant to Istanbul, Turkey. In 2006, Boris co-wrote and edited the U. S. Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee’s report on Hurricane Katrina.

In 2010, Boris received his MFA in fiction from New York University, where he was a New York Times Foundation Fellow. He was a 2010-11 Writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Mass., and received a 2011-12 Fellowship from The New York Foundation of the Arts in Nonfiction. He received 2012 residencies from Mesa Refuge 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. He is also one of the recipients of CEC Arts Link’s 2012-13 grants for American artists doing research in Eastern Europe; he will be traveling to Ukraine to collect recipes for an unusual Ukrainian cookbook.

In early 2013, Boris’ novel A Replacement Life, the story of a failed journalist who starts forging Holocaust-restitution claims for old Russian Jews in Brooklyn, sold to HarperCollins for publication in spring 2014. He is now at work on his next.

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