Joshua Jelly-Schapiro is a geographer and writer whose books include Names of New York (Pantheon, 2021), Island People: The Caribbean and the World (Knopf, 2016) and Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas (California, 2016), which he co-edited with Rebecca Solnit and which received the Municipal Art Society's Brendan Gill Prize in 2017. His work has appeared in publications including The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Harper's, The Nation, Transition, Artforum, The Guardian, and The Believer, among others.

Jelly-Schapiro earned his PhD in Geography at UC-Berkele. He speaks and lectures widely, and currently directs the popular Author Talks series at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn. Jelly-Schapiro has taught at Stanford, Berkeley, Yale, and NYU, where he is a scholar-in-residence at the Institute for Public Knowledge, and teaches journalism in the program Cultural Reporting and Criticism .