Russell's stories have been featured in
The Best American Short Stories,
Conjunctions,
Granta,
The New Yorker,
Oxford American, and
Zoetrope. She was named a
National Book Foundation "5 Under 35" young writer honoree at the November 2009 ceremony for her first short story collection, ''St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves'', for which Russell won the Bard Fiction Prize in 2011. Russell's second book and
first novel,
Swamplandia!, about a family of alligator wrestlers and their shabby amusement park in the Everglades, was long-listed for the 2011
Orange Prize. The novel was also included in
The New York Times' "10 Best Books of 2011" and won the New York Public Library's 2012
Young Lions Fiction Award.
Swamplandia! was a finalist for the 2012
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction; however, none of the three finalists received enough votes, and no prize was awarded. Russell's second collection of short stories,
Vampires in the Lemon Grove, was published by
Vintage Contemporaries in February 2013. Her third short story collection,
Orange World and Other Stories, was released in May 2019. Her short story "The Hox River Window," published in
Zoetrope: All-Story, won the 2012
National Magazine Award for fiction. She is the recipient of the Mary Ellen von der Heyden
Berlin Prize and was awarded a fellowship at the
American Academy in Berlin for Spring 2012. "Reeling for the Empire" won the
Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novelette of 2012. In 2013, Russell received a
MacArthur Foundation "Genius Grant." In 2010, Russell was a visiting writer at the
Iowa Writers' Workshop. She later served as an artist in residence at
Yaddo in
Saratoga Springs, NY. In Fall 2013, Russell was a distinguished guest teacher of creative writing in the MFA program at
Rutgers University-Camden. Russell held the Endowed Chair in Creative Writing at
Texas State University’s MFA program from 2017 through 2020. In March 2025, her second novel
The Antidote was released. It was shortlisted for the 2025
National Book Award for Fiction and is a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award for fiction. ==Personal life==