Meghan O’Rourke
NYT Bestselling Writer
National Book Award Finalist
Poet, Nonfiction Author, Editor
Editor of The Yale Review
Readings &
Lecture Topics
- Reimagining Chronic Illness: Narrative, Medicine, and the Search for Meaning
- Writing the Self Today: Memoir, Research, and the Ethics of First-Person Narrative
- Poetry of the Body: Illness and Embodiment in Contemporary American Verse
- The Art of Literary Editing: Curating Culture in the Digital Age
- Writing Grief: Lyric Form and the Work of Mourning
- Radical Attention: Teaching and Writing in an Age of Distraction
- What’s at Stake in Higher Education: Culture Wars, Defunding, and the Future of the Imagination
- An Evening with Meghan O’Rourke
Biography
“To face death without the architecture of belief may be devastating, but when endured by gifted writers, it results in a potent genre: the memoir of loss. Add to the canon the talented young writer Meghan O’Rourke.” —LA Times
“Fiercely and fearlessly rich, her lines burn like encaustic: ‘the burning thing.’” –John Ashbery
Meghan O’Rourke is an award-winning poet, bestselling nonfiction writer, editor, and cultural critic. She is the author of The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness, a New York Times bestseller and finalist for the National Book Award in Nonfiction, and The Long Goodbye, a bestselling memoir of grief named one of the “Most Moving Books of 2011” by O, The Oprah Magazine. Both books have been widely translated and praised for their lyricism and intellectual rigor.
She is also the author of three acclaimed poetry collections: Sun in Days, a New York Times Top 10 Poetry Book of 2017 and finalist for the Patterson Poetry Prize; Once; and Halflife, a finalist for the Forward First Book Prize and the Patterson Poetry Prize. She is the editor of the forthcoming anthology The Story of the Body: Poems of Illness and Recovery (W.W. Norton, 2026) and of A World Out of Reach: Dispatches from Life Under Lockdown. Across genres, O’Rourke’s work explores the porous boundaries between body and mind, public and private life, lyric and criticism.
O’Rourke began her career as an editor at The New Yorker and has served as culture editor and literary critic for Slate, and poetry editor of The Paris Review. Her essays, poems, and criticism appear widely in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Nation, Poetry, and Best American Poetry. She is the editor of The Yale Review, which became a National Magazine Award–winning publication under her leadership, and a Professor in the Practice of Creative Writing at Yale University, where she teaches courses on literary editing and contemporary literary culture.
Her honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Radcliffe Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, two Pushcart Prizes, the inaugural May Sarton Poetry Prize, the Union League Prize for Poetry from the Poetry Foundation, and a Front Page Award for cultural criticism. A graduate of Yale University, she has also taught at Princeton, NYU, and The New School.
You can follow her ongoing reflections on the craft of writing, illness, and culture at her Substack.
Short Bio
Meghan O’Rourke is an award-winning poet, bestselling nonfiction writer, and acclaimed editor. She is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness, a finalist for the National Book Award in Nonfiction, and the bestselling memoir The Long Goodbye—both widely translated. Her poetry collections include Sun in Days (named a New York Times Top 10 Poetry Book of 2017), Once, and Halflife, a finalist for the Forward First Book Prize. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, the inaugural May Sarton Poetry Prize,a Front Page Award for Cultural Criticism, and two Pushcart Prizes, O’Rourke has written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The New York Times. Formerly an editor at The New Yorker and The Paris Review, she is the editor of The Yale Review and a professor of creative writing at Yale University.
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Publications
The Invisible Kingdom
Memoir, 2022
Sun In Days
Poetry, 2017
Named a Best Poetry Book of 2017 by the New York Times Book Review, Sun in Days is celebrated as “O’Rourke’s most ravishing and brilliant collection yet.” This powerful poetry collection chronicles the frailty of the body, the longing for a child, and the philosophical questions raised when the body goes dramatically awry. These formally ambitious poems and lyric essays give voice to the experience of illness, the permanence of loss, and invigorating moments of grace. A Paterson Poetry Prize finalist, Sun in Days is unsentimental yet deeply felt, characterized by O’Rourke’s signature lyric precision and force of observation.
The Long Goodbye: A Memoir Of Grief
Memoir, 2012
What does it mean to mourn today, in a culture that has largely set aside rituals that acknowledge grief? After her mother died of cancer at the age of fifty-five, Meghan O’Rourke found that nothing had prepared her for the intensity of her sorrow. In the first anguished days, she began to create a record of her interior life as a mourner, trying to convey the paradox of grief—its monumental agony and microscopic intimacies—an endeavor that ultimately bloomed into a profound look at how caring for her mother during her illness changed and strengthened their bond. With lyricism and unswerving candor, The Long Goodbye captures the fleeting moments of joy that make up a life and the way memory can lead us out of the jagged darkness of loss.
Once
2011
The incandescent poems in Once explore loss, violence, and recovery. Facing a mother’s impending death, O’Rourke invokes a vanished childhood of “American houses, wet/ kids moving through them in Spandex bathing suits;/ inside, sandwiches with crusts cut off.” But the future hangs ominously over this summer paradise: not just the death of O’Rourke’s mother, but the stark civic traumas faced by American citizens in the 21st century. “The future,” O’Rourke writes, “is all still/ a dream, a night sweat to be swum off/ in a wonderland of sand a bread.”
Halflife
2007
The insomniac speakers in Halflife are coming of age in a mythical world full of threat and promise. Seeking their true selves amid the fallen cathedrals of America, they speak wryly of destructive love affairs, aesthetic obsession, and encroaching war, but refuse to abandon hope in the power of imagination in this inaugural poetry collection.
Articles & Audio
Read What’s In Print
• The End of the University as We Know It – New York Times
• COVID Long Haulers Are Calling Attention to Chronic Illnesses – Scientific American
• Read “Why We Write about Grief: A Conversation with Joyce Carol Oates”
• Review of The Long Goodbye —The New York Times
Listen to Audio
• Navesink —The New Yorker
Selected Writings
• Grappling With a Terrible Milestone: One Hundred Thousand Dead – The Atlantic
• Read “Doctors Tell All— and It’s Bad” – The Atlantic
• Read “Mourning Trump and the America That Could Have Been” — The New Yorker
• Read “A Father and a Daughter Talk About Loss” — The Huffington Post
• Read an excerpt of The Long Goodbye — The New York Times
• Read “Halflife” — Poetry Foundation
NAVESINK
Before he died, blind and emaciated,
my grandfather, who loved the opera,
told me sometimes
among the tall trees he walked and
listened to the sound
of a river entering the sea
by letting itself be swallowed.
