Jeff Goodell is an American author of seven non-fiction books and a longtime contributing writer to Rolling Stone.[1] Goodell's writings are known for a focus on energy and environmental issues. He is Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council[2] and a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow.[3]
Jeff Goodell was born in Palo Alto, California. He grew up in Sunnyvale and worked briefly at Apple Computer in the early 1980s. He graduated from University of California, Berkeley, in 1984, and then helped edit Zyzzyva, a literary magazine in San Francisco. He moved to New York City and attended graduate school at Columbia University, where he received an M.F.A. in 1990.
Goodell started his journalism career at 7 Days, a Manhattan weekly founded and edited by Adam Moss. He covered cops, crime, AIDS, and politics. In 1990, 7 Days won a National Magazine Award for General Excellence. After freelancing for a few years, Goodell became a contributing editor at Rolling Stone in 1995. Since then, he has written hundreds of pieces for the magazine, including cover stories about climate politics, Steve Jobs, and President Barack Obama.
Goodell has published seven books, including Sunnyvale (2000) a personal memoir about growing up in Silicon Valley and the breakdown of his family; Our Story: 77 Hours That Tested Our Friendship and Our Faith (2002), about the Pennsylvania Quecreek Mine Rescue of nine trapped coal miners in 2002 that was a New York Times Best Seller; and Big Coal: The Dirty Secret Behind America's Energy Future (2006) that the New York Times called "a compelling indictment of one of the country's biggest, most powerful and most antiquated industries...well-written, timely, and powerful".[4]
In 2017, he published The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World that describes visits to places likely to be inundated by rising sea levels.[6] It was a New York Times Critics Top Book of 2017[7] and selected by the Washington Post as one of the 50 best non-fiction books of 2017.[8]
