Amy Ellis Nutt

Nutt was born in Staten Island and grew up in Central New Jersey. She is the middle child of five children. She studied at Smith College, where she received a B.A. in English and Philosophy, before transferring to MIT, where she earned a Master of Science in Philosophy. She briefly worked as a philosophy professor at Tufts University the University of Massachusetts before switching to a career in journalism. She began as a fact-checker at Sport Illustrated before getting a Master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University. She then wrote for the Newark Star-Ledger, where she was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in feature writing in 2009 for “The Accidental Artist,” which eventually became her first book, Shadows Bright as Glass. In 2011, she won the Pulitzer Prize in feature writing for her series “The Wreck of the Lady Mary.” She also taught journalism at Harvard and Princeton during this period. In 2014 she moved to Washington, D.C. to write for The Washington Post as a science writer, and in 2015 she published Becoming Nicole.