Vince Beiser

Vince L. Beiser (born July 13, 1965) is an American-Canadian journalist based in Vancouver, Canada. His first book, The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization was a finalist for a PEN/E.O. Wilson Award and a California Book Award. “Stunning,” says NPR; “impassioned and alarming,” says the Washington Post.

Vince has reported from over 100 countries, states, provinces, kingdoms, occupied territories, liberated areas, no man’s lands and disaster zones. He has exposed conditions in California’s harshest prisons, trained with troops bound for Iraq, ridden with the first responders to disasters in Haiti and Nepal and hunted down other stories from around the world for publications including Wired, The Atlantic, Harper’s, The Guardian, GQ (UK), The Nation, Mother Jones, Playboy, Rolling Stone, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times. 

He has also been a correspondent for the Emmy-winning news show SoCal Connected, a senior editor for Mother Jones, a contributing editor to Playboy, a special projects reporter for The Oakland Tribune, and a senior writer for The Jerusalem Report, Israel’s leading news magazine. He is a grantee of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

Vince’s work has been honored by Investigative Reporters and Editors, the Society of Professional Journalists, the American Society of Journalists and Authors, the Columbia, Medill and Missouri Graduate Schools of Journalism, the National Mental Health Association, the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies and many other institutions. He has twice been part of a team that won the National Magazine Award for General Excellence, and shared in a Los Angeles-area Emmy award. He is also a grantee of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

His articles have been featured in several textbooks and anthologies, and have been translated into half-a-dozen languages and reprinted around the world in publications from GQ-South Africa to Reader’s Digest-Asia. Several of them have also been optioned by film and television producers, including Amazon Studios and Ridley Scott’s Scott Free Productions. Vince has also been a producer and correspondent for the Emmy-winning news show SoCal Connected.

Vince has appeared on numerous TV and radio shows on CBS, BBC, NPR and other networks, and on many panel discussions and lectures. He graduated with highest honors (Summa cum Laude) from the University of California at Berkeley with a degree in Middle Eastern Studies.

Vince is also, oddly, the co-author of a feature film screenplay commissioned by director Steven Soderbergh.

---