Mason Currey is a writer and editor living in Los Angeles and the author of the Daily Rituals books.
He was born in Honesdale, Pennsylvania, and graduated from the University of North Carolina at Asheville and the Columbia Publishing Course (aka “the shortest graduate school in the country”).
In 2007, while procrastinating on a magazine article due the next morning, he launched the Daily Routines blog, which, to his surprise, eventually attracted international press attention and thousands of visitors a day. In 2009, Currey shuttered the blog in order to research a book on the same theme. When it was published in 2013, Daily Rituals: How Artists Work was reviewed in the New Yorker, the Guardian, the Wall Street Journal, and the Believer and named one of NPR’s best books of the year. It has since been translated into 17 languages.
In 2019, Currey published a sequel, Daily Rituals: Women at Work, featuring profiles of the day-to-day working lives of 143 women writers, artists, and performers. Booklist said, “The spectrum of creativity is radiant, and each artist’s rituals of concentration and balancing act between art and life are revelatory and awe-inspiring.”
In addition to compiling the Daily Rituals books, Currey was a design-magazine editor for ten years, working as the managing editor of Metropolis, the executive editor of Print, a senior editor at Core77, and the programming chair for the 2015 Core77 Conference. His freelance writing has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, and Slate, and he has delivered talks on the creative process to art students, writers’ groups, and the partners of the design consultancy IDEO.