Randy Fertel

Randy Fertel is the author of Winging It: Improv’s Power and Peril in the Time of Trump (Spring Publications, 2024), A Taste for Chaos: The Art of Literary Improvisation (Spring Publications, 2015) and The Gorilla Man and the Empress of Steak: A New Orleans Family Memoir (University Press of Mississippi, 2011). He is the co-founder of the Ridenhour Prizes for Courageous Truth-telling. Fertel holds a PhD in English and American literature from Harvard University. He has taught English at Harvard University, Tulane University, LeMoyne College, and the New School for Social Research. He specializes in the literature of the Vietnam War and the literature of exile. In addition to his writing, Fertel is president of the Fertel Foundation and the Ruth U. Fertel Foundation, named for his mother Ruth Fertel, founder of Ruth’s Chris Steak House. He lives in New Orleans and New York.