Photo by Sarah Shatz about the author
Meghan O’Rourke
Journalist, Award-Winning Poet, and Author of The Long Goodbye: A Memoir
Meghan O’Rourke began her career as one of the youngest editors in the history of The New Yorker. Since then, she has served as 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 Slate, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The Nation, Redbook, Vogue, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, and Best American Poetry.
Meghan is also the author of the acclaimed book of poems Halflife, which was a finalist for both the Patterson Poetry Prize and Britain’s Forward First Book Prize. She was awarded the inaugural May Sarton Poetry Prize, the Poetry Foundation’s Union League Prize for Poetry, 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 a finalist for the Rome Prize of the Academy of Arts and Letters. She has also appeared on PBS’s Charlie Rose and on NPR. A graduate of Yale University, she teaches at Princeton and New York University and lives in Brooklyn, where she grew up.
Learn more about this speakerPress Links
Best Books of 2011
Publishers Weekly
The Long Goodbye Review
The Guardian
"18 Books to Watch for in April 2011"
O, The Oprah Magazine
"Story's End"
The New Yorker
The Long Goodbye Review
Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
"A Memoir of Loss: A Profile of Meghan O'Rourke"
Publishers Weekly
"Why We Write About Grief"
The New York Times
The Long Goodbye Review
Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review
"The Unfolding"
The New Yorker
"Unmothered, on Mother's Day"
Slate
"Good Grief"
The New Yorker
"The Long Goodbye"
Slate
"Subject Sylvia"
Poetry
Featured Book
The Long Goodbye
"“Meghan O’Rourke has written a beautiful memoir about her loss of a truly irreplaceable mother—yes, it is sad, it is in fact heartrending, but it is many things more: courageous, inspiring, wonderfully intelligent and informed, and an intimate portrait of an American family as well."
—Joyce Carol Oates
Speaking Topics
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The Long Goodbye: A Memoir
In the first days after losing her mother to cancer at the age of 55, Meghan O’Rourke found herself trying to create a record of her interior experience, in order to better comprehend it (and survive it). In The Long Goodbye, she asks what it is like to mourn in an age that has largely lost the mourning rituals that used to guide the bereaved through a loss. In this talk, Meghan O’Rourke will speak about what grief is actually like, touching on psychiatric research and literary portrayals.
- Grief and Creativity: Writing about Loss
- Writing Poetry
- Magazine Editing
- Writing Across Genres
Please contact us for booking requirements and availability.