Discipline: Literature – nonfiction

Ross Perlin

Discipline: Literature – nonfiction
Region: Ridgewood, NY
MacDowell Fellowships: 2022

Ross Perlin is a linguist, writer, and translator from New York City. He is co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance and teaches linguistics at Columbia. He was awarded an NEH Fellowship in 2020 and a Gardiner Fellowship at the Gotham Center in 2021.

His first book, Intern Nation: How to Earn Nothing and Learn Little in the Brave New Economy, sparked a national conversation about the consequences of unpaid labor and the future of work. He translated Liao Yiwu's Bullets and Opium and Chen Guangcheng's The Barefoot Lawyer.

While at MacDowell, Ross worked on the manuscript of a narrative non-fiction book, under contract with Grove Atlantic, about endangered languages from around the world now coming to New York due to immigration and globalization.

Studios

Calderwood

Ross Perlin worked in the Calderwood studio.

In the winter of 1998, motivated by his passion for reading, Stanford Calderwood donated funds for a new writers’ studio. Burr-McCallum Architects of Williamstown, MA, provided the award-winning design in 1999; and the construction of the handsome studio was completed in time for its first artist to arrive early in 2000. With a series of double-hung casement…

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