Rachel Louise Snyder is an accomplished author and journalist with a focus on human rights and social justice issues. She has written several books, including "Fugitive Denim: A Moving Story of People and Pants in the Borderless World of Global Trade," "What We’ve Lost is Nothing," "No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us," and the forthcoming memoir "Women We Buried, Women We Burned" (May ’23). Snyder's work has been featured in prominent publications such as The New Yorker, The New York Times magazine, The Washington Post, and on NPR. She has also received numerous awards for her writing, including a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship, the 2018 Lukas Work-in-Progress Award, the 2020 Book Tube Prize, the 2020 New York Public Library’s Bernstein Award for Excellence in Journalism, and the Sidney Hillman Book Award for social justice.
Snyder's book "No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us" was particularly well-received, earning recognition as one of the best books of 2019 by several publications and receiving starred reviews from Kirkus, Book Riot, and Publisher’s Weekly. The book was also a finalist for the Kirkus Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the LA Times Book Award, and the Silver Gavel Award. "No Visible Bruises" has been translated into several languages, including Russian, Mandarin, Korean, Japanese, Turkish, Spanish, and Hungarian, and won Best Book in Translation in Taiwan in 2021.
Over the past two decades, Snyder has traveled to over sixty countries, covering stories of human rights, gender-based violence, natural disasters, displacement, and war. She lived in Phnom Penh, Cambodia for six years and in London for two years before relocating to Washington, DC in 2009. Snyder holds a B.A. from North Central College and an M.F.A. from Emerson College. She currently has a joint appointment as a professor in journalism and literature at American University. She can be followed on Twitter or Instagram at @rlswrites.