Rachel Kushner, Commencement Speaker for the 2025 Rhetoric and Film & Media Commencement Ceremony, reflected on her commencement address and her time as an undergraduate student at UC Berkeley in a June 30, 2025 New York Times opinon piece.
Rachel Kushner is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels The Mars Room, The Flamethrowers, and Telex from Cuba, the short story collection The Strange Case of Rachel K, and a book of essays, The Hard Crowd. Her new novel, Creation Lake, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and longlisted for the National Book Award, the Pen/Faulkner Award, and the Carol Shields Award. She has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction, the Folio Prize, was twice a finalist for both the National Book Award in Fiction and the Booker Prize, and winner of the Prix Médicis étranger. She is a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and the recipient of the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, and Harper’s, and her books have been translated into 29 languages.