Susan Orlean has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1992, and is the author of seven books, including The Orchid Thief and Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend. She was a 2003 Nieman Fellow at Harvard and a 2012 Guggenheim Fellow in Creative Arts. She is currently writing a history of the Los Angeles Public Library and the arson fire that nearly destroyed it in 1986.
Portrait by Noah Fecks