Biography
Boris Fishman was born in Minsk, in the former Soviet Union, in 1979, and immigrated to the United States in 1988, at nine. Boris received a degree in Russian literature from Princeton University in 2001. He was on the editorial staff of The New Yorker between 2001 and 2004. In 2003, he edited “Wild East: Stories from the Last Frontier,” a collection of short stories about the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the early post-Communist years. In 2003-04, he was a finalist for the Koret Young Writer on Jewish Themes Award and, in 2004, the recipient of 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. Boris is a freelance journalist, editor, and translator (from Russian) whose work has appeared in the New Yorker, The New York Times, The New Republic, The Nation, Harper’s, New York Magazine, and other publications, as well as in anthologies and works by others. (See Miscellany.) In 2006, Boris co-wrote and edited the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee’s report on Hurricane Katrina and worked on Senator Bill Bradley’s “The New American Story.” In 2007, he edited “Extraordinary Circumstances,” the memoir of WorldCom whistleblower Cynthia Cooper. Boris is now at work on a book about masculinity.