Paul Russell is an American novelist, poet, and short story writer. He is a two-time winner of the Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBT fiction, in 2000 for The Coming Storm and in 2012 for The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov, a fictionalized portrayal of Sergey Nabokov, the gay younger brother of Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov, about whom very little concrete biographical information is known.
Russell grew up in Memphis, Tennessee, where his father Jack was a mathematics professor at Southwestern at Memphis. He studied at Oberlin College and Cornell University. He was a professor of English literature at Vassar College.