Vince Beiser is an award-winning journalist based in Los Angeles. His book on the deadly global war for the world’s most important yet most overlooked commodity—sand—will be published by Penguin/Random House in early 2018.
Vince has reported from over 100 countries, states, provinces, emirates, kingdoms, occupied territories, liberated areas, aircraft carriers, 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 Haiti’s earthquake and hunted down other stories from around the world for publications including Wired, The Atlantic, Harper’s, The Village Voice, The Guardian, The Nation, Rolling Stone,The Los Angeles Times Magazine, and The New York Times. He has also been 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 current grantee of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
Vince’s work has been honored by Investigative Reporters and Editors, the American Society of Journalists and Authors, the Society of Professional Journalists, 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 also twice been part of a team that won the National Magazine Award for General Excellence, the magazine industry’s highest honor.
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. Three of them have also been optioned by film and television producers.
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.