Summer Brennan is an award-winning investigative journalist and author, born and raised in Northern California. She received the 2016 Matthew Power Literary Reporting Award, and was a visiting scholar at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University. Her first book, The Oyster War: The True Story of a Small Farm, Big Politics, and the Future of Wilderness in America, published in August 2015, was shortlisted for the Orion Book Award and was a finalist for the Northern California Independent Booksellers Award. She has written for New York Magazine, The Paris Review, Scientific American, Longreads, Pacific Standard, McSweeneys, The Millions, Lit Hub, Buzzfeed, The Rumpus, The San Francisco Chronicle, and others. She received a bachelor’s from Bennington College, where she studied painting and poetry, and a master’s from NYU’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, where she studied journalism and Middle Eastern politics. A longtime communications consultant at the United Nations, she worked on special political issues from 2008 to 2010—including decolonization, atomic radiation, outer space technologies, and the Middle East—and on nuclear weapons, disarmament, and international security from 2011 to 2015. Other UN projects include work on the environment, gender equality, human rights, and the UN Global Ebola Response. Her third book, The Parisian Sphinx, about 19th century French artist and model Victorine Meurent, will be published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. She lives in Brooklyn and New Mexico.