Russell Working—a former Chicago Tribune reporter and author of three books of fiction—will discuss storytelling techniques for fiction and nonfiction, drawing from his years abroad as a foreign correspondent.

Working is the author of the new novel The Insurrectionist, a satire of the news media in the post-Jan. 6, 2021, era.

Working, along with his wife Nonna, discovered a watch belonging to Aisin-Gioro Puyi—last emperor of China’s Qing Dynasty—in the Russian Far East. The watch later auctioned for $6.2 million.

Working has written two collections of short stories: Resurrectionists, which won the Iowa Short Fiction Award, and The Irish Martyr, winner of the University of Notre Dame’s Sullivan Award. The title story of The Irish Martyr was included in Pushcart’s 2005 anthology. He has won numerous short fiction awards, and he twice received the $5,000 Hackney Award for the Novel. He holds an MFA in creative writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts.

A freelance writer, Working is a former staff reporter for the Chicago Tribune and other newspapers. He spent over six years freelancing abroad from Russia and Cyprus. His byline has appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Japan Times, The Jerusalem Post, Kyoto Journal, The Paris Review, BusinessWeek, the South China Morning Post, TriQuarterly, Zoetrope: All-Story, Crazyhorse, The Atlantic, Columbia Journalism Review, and scores of other publications worldwide.

Publisher’s Weekly praised Working’s fiction as “reminiscent of the early Paul Bowles, with the same muscular use of language, the same ability to create a mood fraught with tension.” The New York Times commended his “amazing ability to draw the reader immediately into the world about which he is writing, whether it is the paper mills of the Pacific Northwest, where a former policeman is almost courting death, the Haiti of voodoo and the dread Tonton Macoutes, or the lazy hot summer afternoons of a group of young boys.”