Daniel Genis

Daniel Genis is the son of Russian immigrants who came to the USA in 1977; he was born the following year. His father is Alexander Genis, a well-known Russian public intellectual and author. Daniel attended Stuyvesant high school and NYU, graduating in 1999. He began a career in publishing at the same time as selling blow and getting hooked on dope. He also read the entire corpus of writing from antiquity and was well into the Middle Ages when narcotics interfered. After a very desperate summer week in 2003, he was convicted of five counts of robbery and sent to prison for ten years. His time in Maximun Security as a New Yorker-reading smarty-pants and prison-yard weight lifter was good fodder for a journalistic career and the memoir SENTENCE; Ten Years & a Thousand Books in Prison. Today he's been free and clean since his release in 2014 and lives with his wife Petra Szabo in Brooklyn, NY.