Rachel Kushner was born in Eugene, Oregon and moved to San Francisco in 1979. She graduated from the University of California and earned her MFA in creative writing from Columbia University in 2000. Kushner lived in New York City for eight years, where she was an editor at Grand Street magazine and BOMB magazine. She has written widely on contemporary art, including numerous features in Artforum. She is currently an editor of Soft Targets, a Brooklyn-based journal of art, fiction and poetry. Her first novel, Telex from Cuba (2008), was the cover review of the July 6, 2008 issue of The New York Times Book Review, where it was described as a novel whose "sharp observations about human nature and colonialist bias provide a deep understanding of the revolution's causes". Kushner was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award.