Public Biography
Brendan Vossmeier, 34, is a resident of Takoma Park, Maryland, where he has lived, in a one-bedroom apartment above a vegan bakery on Carroll Avenue, since 2019. He has not held regular employment since December 2022 and has not, by his own account, finished the draft of a novel he began “around the Obama years.” He has not voted in any federal, state, or municipal election since 2012, a record he describes, when pressed, as “a sustained and material act of resistance against the patriarchy.”
Mr. Vossmeier graduated from Oberlin College in 2013 with a bachelor’s degree in comparative literature and a minor in gender studies, and subsequently completed three semesters of a master’s program in cultural criticism at the New School, which he did not finish. He maintains a personal Substack, The Long Refusal, which has not published a post since March 2023 and on which he describes himself as “a writer, organizer, and quiet threat to the status quo.”
He is the son of Linda Vossmeier, 68, a retired public-school librarian in Gaithersburg, Md., who has voted in every election since 1978, and the late Raymond Vossmeier, a mechanical engineer at the Bureau of Standards. Mr. Vossmeier is currently dating Amelia Kozlov, 29, a paralegal at a civil-rights firm in Silver Spring. She was recently made aware of the political dimensions of his nonvoting and has said she thinks she is “supposed to admire it.”
Mr. Vossmeier came to national attention in April 2026 after a feature profile in The New York Time5 described the intellectual architecture he has constructed around his thirteen-year failure to register to vote. He has declined subsequent interview requests, citing, in a message relayed through Ms. Kozlov, “the need to conserve energy for the work.”
He owns nine books, four of which are duplicate copies of All About Love by bell hooks.