Emmett Rensin is an essayist and academic. He is the author of The Complications (HarperOne, 2024), an essay collection about living with a severe mental illness, and the historical, cultural, and discursive madness around madness itself.

Before that, he was a columnist for various publications, a features editor for Vox, and a contributing editor to The Los Angeles Review of Books. His political essays, media criticism, cultural criticism, and reporting has appeared in The Atlantic, New Republic, Los Angeles Times, Foreign Policy, and elsewhere. His book and film criticism has appeared in Bookforum, LARB, and Paste.

He is currently working on two books: The first is an academic history and theory of “mad memoirs.” The second is a work of literary nonfiction about the lunatics who disappear into our streets and our asylums, who die in our prisons, and our hospitals, and at our hands on crowded subway trains. It is also about ghosts.