Washington, D.C.
Memoir
Garance Franke-Ruta has been a political reporter and editor in Washington, D.C., for two decades and is currently working on her first book—a memoir about AIDS, activism and coming of age in America. The former editor-in-chief of Yahoo Politics, she has also worked as Yahoo New’s Washington editor, senior editor at The Atlantic, national online politics editor at The Washington Post, and senior editor at The American Prospect. Her reporting and essays have appeared in these publications as well as New York, Medium, The Wall Street Journal, The New Republic, Slate, Salon, The Washington City Paper, Legal Affairs and National Journal. But it is her work before graduating from college in 1997 that brings her now to the Under the Volcano. At the age of 17, Franke-Ruta became one of the youngest members of ACT UP New York, the legendary AIDS activist group. She would go on to be a key member of its Treatment + Data Committee, working to speed the development and release of drugs to treat opportunistic infections. A founding board member of the Treatment Action Group and the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition, her activism during the late 1980s and early ’90s was featured in the Oscar-nominated documentary How to Survive a Plague and award-winning book by the same name. Franke-Ruta will work at Under the Volcano on her memoir project about those years and her early life growing up in bohemian New York City and an American expat community in San Cristobal de las Casas in Chiapas, Mexico. She has been awarded residencies by the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center in Bellagio, Italy, and the Vermont Studio Center.