She is the author of a number of works of science fiction, fantasy and feminist literary criticism such as How to Suppress Women's Writing, as well as a contemporary novel, On Strike Against God, and one children's book, Kittatinny.

[3] As a senior at William Howard Taft High School, Russ was selected as one of the top ten Westinghouse Science Talent Search winners.

[4][5] She graduated from Cornell University, where she studied with Vladimir Nabokov,[6] in 1957, and received her MFA from the Yale Drama School in 1960.

Russ taught at Queensborough Community College from 1966 to 1967, at Cornell from 1967 to 1972, SUNY Binghamton, from 1972 to 1975, and at the University of Colorado, Boulder, from 1975 to 1977.

[11] Russ was one of the most outspoken female authors to challenge male dominance of the field, and is generally regarded as one of the leading feminist science fiction scholars and writers.

[14] Along with her work as a writer of prose fiction, Russ was also a playwright, essayist, and author of nonfiction works, generally literary criticism and feminist theory, including the essay collection Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans & Perverts; How to Suppress Women's Writing; and the book-length study of modern feminism, What Are We Fighting For?.

[15] Both fiction and nonfiction, for Russ, were modes of engaging theory with the real world; in particular, The Female Man can be read as a theoretical or narrative text.

James Tiptree Jr, in a letter to her, wrote, "Do you imagine that anyone with half a functional neuron can read your work and not have his fingers smoked by the bitter, multi-layered anger in it?

[24] These essays include very detailed descriptions of her views on pornography and how influential it was to feminist thought in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

[20] Russ and her work are prominently featured in Sarah LeFanu's In the Chinks of the World Machine: Feminism and Science Fiction (1988).

[12][25] Gwyneth Jones wrote a 2019 book about Joanna Russ that was part of the University of Illinois Press series called Modern Masters of Science Fiction.

[26] In a 2004 essay about the connections between Russ's work and D. W. Griffith's film Intolerance, Samuel R. Delany describes her as being "one of the finest - and most necessary - writers of American fiction" since she published her first professional short story in 1959.

[17] In their article "Learning the 'Prophet Business': The Merril-Russ Intersection," Newell and Tallentire described Russ as an "intelligent, tough-minded reviewer who routinely tempered harsh criticism with just the sort of faint praise she handed out to Judith Merril," who in turn was among the foremost editors and critics in American science fiction in the late 1960s.

James Tiptree Jr. once commented on how Russ could be an "absolute delight" one minute, but then she "rushes out and bites my ankles with one sentence.

She was attacked by readers because of her harsh reviews of Stephen R. Donaldson's Lord Foul's Bane (1977) and Joy Chant's The Grey Mane of Morning (1977).