Meghan O’Rourke
Born in New York, New York in 1976, Meghan O’Rourke received a BA from Yale University and an MFA from Warren Wilson College in Asheville, North Carolina. She began her literary career as an editorial assistant at The New Yorker, where she also worked as a fiction/nonfiction editor from 2000–02.
O’Rourke is the author of three collections of poetry: Sun in Days (W. W. Norton, 2017); Once (W. W. Norton, 2011); and Halflife (W. W. Norton, 2007), which was a finalist for Britain’s Forward First Book Prize. She is also the author of the memoir The Long Goodbye (Riverhead Books, 2011).
Of her work, poet and New York Times reviewer Joel Brouwer writes, “O’Rourke makes room for many fields of memory in these poems, but locks many others away, often by employing a bemused, detached tone reminiscent of the famously reticent Elizabeth Bishop.”
O’Rourke has received the 2005 Union League and Civic Arts Foundation Award from the Poetry Foundation, two Pushcart Prizes, the May Sarton Poetry Prize from the Academy of Arts and Science, and is the recipient of a Radcliffe Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Formerly the poetry editor of The Paris Review and the literary editor of Slate Magazine, she is also a widely published critic and has contributed to The New York Times Book Review and The New Yorker. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, and Marfa, Texas.
