Mitch Horowitz is a PEN Award-winning historian, former vice-president at Penguin Random House, TV host at Discovery/HBO Max, and one of today’s most literate voices of occultism, mysticism, and the unexplained. He has bylines in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Politico, Time, and The Wall Street Journal, and appearances in Sundance-premiering movies, popular TV docuseries, and award-winning documentaries, as well as on CBS Sunday Morning, Dateline NBC, NPR’s All Things Considered, and other major media.
Mitch plays himself in Shudder’s V/H/S/BEYOND, a
2025 Critics Choice nominee for Best Movie Madefor Television. He hosts Discovery/HBO Max’s Alien Encounters: Fact or Fiction.
Mitch’s work illuminates outsider history, explains its relevance to contemporary life, and reveals the longstanding quest to bring empowerment and agency to the human condition. His reporting has called attention to the worldwide crisis of violence against accused witches. He is widely credited with returning the term “New Age” to respectable use and is among the few occult writers whose work touches the bases of academic scholarship, national journalism, and subculture cred.
Mitch is a former writer-in-residence at the New York Public Library and the PEN Award-winning author of books including Occult America; One Simple Idea; The Miracle Club; Daydream Believer; Uncertain Places; Happy Warriors; Modern Occultism; and Practical Magick.
He has discussed alternative spirituality on CBS Sunday Morning, Dateline NBC, NPR’s All Things Considered, CNN, Vox/Netflix’s Explained, VICE News, The Duncan Trussell Family Hour, and seasons I and II of AMC Shudder’s Cursed Films, an official selection of SXSW.
Mitch appears regularly on seasons one and two of History’s The UnBelievable with Dan Ackroyd and in numerous docuseries including MGM+’s BEYOND: UFOs and the Unknown.
Mitch played a newscaster in the Paramount feature thriller My Animal directed by Jacqueline Castel, an official selection of the 2023 Sundance Film Festival.
Mitch hosted, cowrote, and produced a feature documentary about the occult classic The Kybalion directed by Emmy-nominee Ronni Thomas and shot on location in Egypt. In 2022, the movie premiered as the #3 top documentary on iTunes.
Mitch has written on everything from the occult influences on Ronald Reagan to the chequered career of professional skeptic James Randi for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Time, Salon, Politico, and a wide range of ‘zines and scholarly journals. He is the voice of many audiobooks including Alcoholics Anonymous and Raven: The Untold Story of the Rev. Jim Jones and His People (the author of which handpicked him as the voice of Jones).
Mitch’s writing is translated into French, Arabic, Chinese, Italian, Spanish, Korean, Japanese, Turkish, Hebrew, German, Portuguese, and more.
Mitch worked for many years in publishing, including as a vice president at Penguin Random House where he was editor-in-chief of Tarcher/Penguin, an imprint dedicated to metaphysics.
His book Awakened Mind is one of the first works of New Thought translated and published in Arabic. Mitch received the Walden Award for Interfaith/Intercultural Understanding. The Chinese government has censored his work.
Mitch is repped at SpectreVision. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.
What Critics Say About Mitch…
HuffPost: “Has the rare gift of making the esoteric accessible to discerning masses.”
Washington Post: “Treats esoteric ideas and movements with an even-handed intellectual studiousness that is too often lost in today’s raised-voice discussions.”
Paris Match: “Convincing…takes us far from naive doctrines.”
LA Review of Books: “An expert on esoteric religious thought in American life.”
Boing Boing: “Horowitz comes across as the real deal: he is an authentic ‘adept mind’ and he knows his stuff.”
Duncan Trussell: “An amazing author…We are all so lucky to have you out there on the frontlines. You are a wonderful bridge connecting these ethereal, misunderstood, eyeroll-y subjects with a great methodology and with a great way of articulating them.”
David Lynch: “Mitch is solid gold.”
Douglas Rushkoff: "The thinking man's mage."
Filmmaker Magazine: “A genius at distilling down esoteric concepts.”
Conner Habib: “One of the only people I know who pulls off punk rock and self-help simultaneously.”
