Autonomous (Newitz) - Author Bio

Author Bio
• Birth—1969
• Where— Irvine, California, USA
• Education—Ph.D., Univesity of California-Berkeley
• Currently—lives in the San Francisco Bay Area

Annalee Newitz is an American journalist, editor, and author of both fiction and nonfiction. Her most recent work is the novel Autonomous published in 2017.

Newitz was born in 1969, and grew up in Irvine, California, the daughter of two English teachers: her mother, Cynthia, at a high school, and her father, Marty, at a community college. Her father was Jewish, and her mother a white Southerner former Methodist, leading Newitz to call herself "biethnic." She graduated from Irvine High School, and in 1987 moved to Berkeley, California, where in 1998 she completed her Ph.D. in English and American Studies from University of California. Her dissertation focesed on images of monsters, psychopaths, and capitalism in 29th-century American popular culture,it was later published in book form from Duke University Press.

Career
Newitz became a full-time writer and journalist in 1999 with an invitation to write a weekly column for the Metro Silicon Valley weekly, a column which then ran in various venues for nine years. Newitz then served as the culture editor at the San Francisco Bay Guardian from 2000–2004. During thoise years, from 2003-2004, she received a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship as a research fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Following her work at the Guardian she worked as a policy analyst, from 2004-2005, for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Then from 2007–2009, she served on the board of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility. Those years also saw the beginning of Other magazine, which Newitz co-founed with Charlie Jane Anders, a Hugo award-winning author and commentator.

In 2008, Gawker media asked Newitz to start a blog about science and science fiction, dubbed io9 (later merging with Gawker's Gizmodo blog). She served as io9's editor-in-chief until the end of 2015, when she joined Ars Technica as the Tech Culture Editor.

Works
Newitz has written short stories, the novel Autonomous (2017), and several works of nonfiction: White Trash: Race and Class in America (1997), Pretend We're Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture (2006, based on her doctoral thesis), and Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction (2013). In addition, she edited The Bad Subjects Anthology (1998) and She's Such a Geek (co-edited, with Charlie Anders, 2006).

Her work has also been published in Popular Science, Wired, Salon.com, New Scientist, Metro Silicon Valley, San Francisco Bay Guardian, and at AlterNet. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 11/8/2017.)