Her maternal great-grandfather Max was from Bessarabia. Gornick was a reporter for the Village Voice from 1969 to 1977. Her work has also appeared in the New York Times, The Nation, the Atlantic Monthly, and many other publications. In 1969, the radical feminist group New York Radical Feminists was founded by Shulamith Firestone and Anne Koedt; Firestone's and Koedt's desire to start thisnew group was aided by Gornick's 1969 Village Voice article, "The Next Great Moment in History Is Theirs". The end of this essay announced the formation of the group and included a contact address and phone number, raising considerable national interest from prospective members. Gornick has also publishedeleven books; the most recent, 'The Odd Woman and the City, was published in May, 2015. She teaches writing at The New School. For the 2007-2008 academic year, she was a fellow at the Radcliffe Insti- tute at Harvard University, and in 2015 she served as the Bedell DistinguishedVisiting Professor in the University of Iowa's Nonfiction Writing Program. For Vivian Gornick, self-narrative is a form of cultural criticism: The personal is decidedly political. As a staff writer for the Village Voice during the early 1970s, Gornick reported on the explosion of American feminist consciousness through the prism of her own experience, and that willingness to use her own life experiences to tell a larger social story has become the hallmark of her writing.