Rachel Kushner
writer from the United States (b. 1968)
Rachel Kushner (born October 7, 1968) is an American writer, known for her novels Telex from Cuba (2008), The Flamethrowers (2013), The Mars Room (2018), and Creation Lake (2024).
Early life
Kushner was born in Eugene, Oregon, the daughter of two scientists she has called "deeply unconventional people from the beatnik generation." Her mother is part of a family of St. Louis Unitarians who lived for a time in pre-revolutionary Cuba while her father is of Jewish ancestry. Her mother arranged after-school work for her, straightening and alphabetizing books at a feminist bookstore, when she was five years old, and Kushner says "it was instilled in me that I was going to be a writer of some kind from a young age." Kushner moved with her family to San Francisco in 1979.
When she was 16, she began her bachelor's degree in political economy at the University of California, Berkeley, with an emphasis on United States foreign policy in Latin America. Kushner lived as an exchange student in Italy when she was 18; upon completing her Bachelor of Arts, she lived in San Francisco, working at nightclubs. At 26, she enrolled in the fiction program at Columbia University and earned a MFA degree in creative writing in 2000. There she studied under Jonathan Franzen, among others. She considers novelist Don DeLillo a friend, a mentor and a "tutelary figure."
Career
Novels
Kushner's first novel, Telex from Cuba, was published by Scribner in July 2008. She got the idea for her novel after completing her MFA in 2000, and she made three long trips to Cuba over the six years it took her to write the book.
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 31, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7279300. VIAF identifies the subject as 20621405. The Library of Congress control number is nr2004014752. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1968, 2008, 2013 and 2018.
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This entry incorporates text from “Rachel Kushner” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.