Meghan O’Rourke

Meghan O’Rourke is the author of the memoir The Long Goodbye (2011), a study of grief in America, and the poetry collections Once (2011) and Halflife (2007), which was a finalist for both the Forward First Book Prize and the Patterson Poetry Prize. She has been an editor at the New Yorker, culture editor and literary critic for Slate, as well as poetry editor and advisory editor for the Paris Review. Her essays, criticism, and poems have appeared in those magazines, as well as the New York Times Magazine, New York Times Book Review, Nation, Vogue, Poetry, Kenyon Review, and Best American Poetry. She was awarded the inaugural May Sarton Poetry Prize, the Union League Prize for Poetry from the Poetry Foundation, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, two Pushcart Prizes, and a Front Page Award for her cultural criticism. One of three judges chosen to select Granta’s Best Young American Novelists in 2007, she has been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo. A graduate of Yale University, she has taught at Princeton, The New School, and New York University. She lives in Brooklyn, where she grew up, and Marfa, Texas.

Profile photograph by Sarah Shatz