About

Mark’s career

Kramer teaches an independent master class, the Kitchen Workshop, for mid-career writers.  It covers the writing process from topic selection through publishing, and includes reporting, field and research note coding, structuring, drafting, and gaining control of the subtle crafts of revision, including voice, pace, description, and characterization.

In the late ‘90s, Kramer founded one of America’s most influential writing conferences while a professor at Boston University.  It moved with him when he became writer-in-residence and founding director of the Nieman Program on Narrative Journalism at Harvard University.  He has also founded ongoing narrative journalism conferences in Amsterdam, Bergen (Norway) and London, and co-edited one of the leading textbook/guides in the field. 

Kramer’s work has appeared in The New York Times, Boston Globe, National Geographic, The Atlantic Monthly, Outside, Best American Essays, and many other publications.

His books include Mother Walter and the Pig Tragedy; Three Farms: Making Milk, Meat and Money from the American Soil; Invasive Procedures: A Year in the World of Two Surgeons; and Travels with a Hungry Bear: A Journey to the Russian Heartland. 

He’s co-edited two widely used textbooks, Literary Journalism (also published in Spanish); and Telling True Stories: A Writer’s Guide to Narrative Nonfiction from the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University (also published in Mandarin and Korean). He co-edited a textbook in Danish, Virkelighedens Fortællere—ny Amerikansk Journalistik. 

A chapter he wrote, “Coming of Age as a Writer in the Sixties—Realizations about Voice” appears in The Routledge Companion to American Literary Journalism.  

Kramer was writer-in-residence in the American Studies Program at Smith College (1980-1990);  professor and writer-in-residence in the journalism department at Boston University (1990-2001), writer-in-residence and founding director of the Nieman Program on Narrative Journalism and the Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism (2001-2007), and returned to Boston University as director of the Power of Narrative Conference and writer-in-residence in the journalism department from 2010 to 2020. He’s been a visiting professor at the Institut d’études politiques de Paris (Sciences Po), and at Doshisha University in Kyoto.