Vivian Gornick was born in the Bronx, NY and received a bachelor of arts degree from City College of New York and in 1960 a master of arts degree from New York University.
Gornick was a reporter for the Village Voice from 1969 to 1977. Her work has also appeared in the New York Times, The Nation, the Atlantic Monthly, and many other publications. In 1969, the radical feminist group New York Radical Feminists was founded by Shulamith Firestone and Anne Koedt. Firestone's and Koedt's desire to start this new group was aided by Gornick's 1969 Village Voice article, "The Next Great Moment in History Is Theirs". The end of this essay announced the formation of the group and included a contact address and phone number, raising considerable national interest from prospective members. Gornick has also published eleven books; the most recent, The Odd Woman and the City, was published in May, 2015. She teaches writing at The New School. For the 2007–2008 academic year, she was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, and in 2015 she served as the Bedell Distinguished Visiting Professor in the University of Iowa's Nonfiction Writing Program.
