Vince Beiser

GRANTEE

Vince Beiser is an award-winning journalist and author of The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization. The book has been translated into five languages, was a finalist for a 2019 PEN America award and a California Book Award, and spawned a TEDx talk. Vince is currently at work on a new book, Power Metal, about the trillion-dollar global scramble for the rare metals we need to transition to a world run on renewable energy — and the human and environmental damage that may come with it.

Beiser has exposed conditions in California’s harshest prisons, trained with troops bound for Iraq, ridden with first responders to natural disasters in Haiti and Nepal, and hunted down other stories from around the world for publications including Wired, The Atlantic, Harper’s, Time, The Guardian, Mother Jones, Rolling Stone, The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times.

His work has been honored by Investigative Reporters and Editors, the Society of Professional Journalists, the Columbia, Medill and Missouri Graduate Schools of Journalism, and many other institutions. He has three times been part of a team that won the National Magazine Award for General Excellence, and shared in an Emmy for his work with the PBS TV series SoCal Connected.

Vince Beiser