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.