Finding that social security comes up short, often underwater on mortgages, these invisible casualties of the Great Recession have taken to the road by the tens of thousands in late-model RVs, travel trailers, and vans, forming a growing community of nomads: migrant laborers who call themselves 'workampers.' On frequently traveled routes between seasonal jobs, Jessica Bruder meets people from all walks of life: a former professor, a McDonald's vice president, a minister, a college administrator, and a motorcycle cop, among many others-including her irrepressible protagonist, a onetime cocktail waitress, Home Depot clerk, and general contractor named Linda May. She is, eternally, a proud and patch-wearing member of the Madagascar Institute and the Flaming Lotus Girls.From the beet fields of North Dakota to the National Forest campgrounds of California to Amazon's CamperForce program in Texas, employers have discovered a new, low-cost labor pool, made up largely of transient older Americans. Going back further, she was a Starbucks barista, a snowboarder, an electric guitar nerd, a music store clerk, a junior camp counselor and a really lousy waitress on Rue Oberkampf in Paris. Her work has been supported by the Bellagio Center, Yaddo, MacDowell and the Economic Hardship Reporting Project. in magazine writing from Columbia Journalism School. in English and French from Amherst College and an M.S. Her photography appears in Nomadland and Burning Book and has been published by The New York Times, The New York Observer and Blender magazine. She was a staff reporter at The Oregonian. She has also written for New York Magazine, WIRED, Harper's Magazine, The Washington Post, The Associated Press, The International Herald Tribune, The New York Times Magazine and The Guardian.

Jessica teaches narrative storytelling at Columbia Journalism School and contributes to The New York Times. Her next book, co-authored with Dale Maharidge, is about trust in the age of surveillance. She is the author of Burning Book: A Visual History of Burning Man (2007). Anthony Lukas Prize and the Helen Bernstein Book Award. Named a New York Times Notable Book and Editors' Choice, Nomadland won the 2017 Discover Award and was a finalist for the J. The project spanned three years and more than 15,000 miles of driving - from coast to coast and from Mexico to the Canadian border.

For her book Nomadland, she spent months living in a camper van, documenting itinerant Americans who gave up traditional housing and hit the road full time, enabling them to travel from job to job and carve out a place for themselves in a precarious economy.

Jessica Bruder is a journalist who writes about subcultures.

Jessica bruder nomadland