Meghan O'Rourke (born 1976 in Brooklyn, New York) is an American nonfiction writer, poet and critic.

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Meghan O'Rourke
Meghan O'Rourke at the 2011 Texas Book Festival.
Born	1976 (age 45–46) Brooklyn, New York
Alma mater	Yale University Warren Wilson College

Background and education

O'Rourke was born January 26, 1976 in Brooklyn, New York.[1] The eldest of three children born to Paul and Barbara O’Rourke, she had two younger brothers. Her mother was a longtime teacher and administrator at Saint Ann’s, an elite independent school in Brooklyn, and later became headmaster of the Pierrepoint School in Westport, Connecticut. Her father, a classicist and Egyptologist, also taught at Saint Ann’s and Pierrepont. O’Rourke attended St. Ann’s through high school. She earned a bachelor’s of arts degree in English language and literature from Yale University in 1997 and a master of fine arts degree in poetry from Warren Wilson College in 2005.[1]

Career

Journalism

Immediately after graduating from Yale, O'Rourke began an internship as an editor at The New Yorker.[1] She was promoted to fiction/nonfiction editor in 2000, becoming one of the youngest-ever editors at the publication.[1] During this time, she also freelanced as a contributing editor of the literary quarterly Grand Street.[1] In 2002 O’Rourke moved to Slate, an online magazine that covers news, culture, and politics. She served as culture and literary editor there from late 2002 to mid-2009 and was a founding editor of DoubleX, a section on Slate that focused on women’s issues.[1] She also continued to moonlight with other publications; from 2005 to 2010 she was a poetry coeditor of the Paris Review.[2] She is also an occasional contributor to The New York Times. O'Rourke has written on a wide range of topics, including horse racing, gender bias in the literary world, the politics of marriage and divorce, and the place of grief and mourning in modern society. She has published poems in literary journals and magazines including The New Yorker, Best American Poetry, The New Republic, and Poetry,[3][2] along with Perrine's Literatures Twelfth Edition.

Her first book of poems, Halflife, was published by Norton in 2007. O'Rourke's book, The Long Goodbye, a memoir of grief and mourning written after the death of her mother, was published to wide critical acclaim in April 2011. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. O'Rourke suffers from an autoimmune disorder which she has written about for The New Yorker.[4] Her latest book, The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness, was released in March 2022.[5] Publishers Weekly named it one of the top ten books of 2022, regardless of genre.[6]

She has been treated for Lyme disease.[7]

On July 1, 2019, O'Rourke became editor of The Yale Review, coinciding with the 200th anniversary of its founding.[8]

Awards and fellowships

• 2005: Union League and Civic Arts Foundation Award from the Poetry Foundation[9]
• 2007: Lannan Literary Award[10]
• 2008: May Sarton Poetry Prize[11]
• 2014: Guggenheim Award for General Nonfiction[12]
• 2017: Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant to complete her book, What's Wrong With Me? The Mysteries of Chronic Illness[13]

Bibliography

This list is incomplete; you can help by adding missing items. (March 2018)

Poetry

Collections

• O'Rourke, Meghan (2007). Halflife : poems. New York: W. W. Norton.
• Once: Poems (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011).
• Sun In Days (New York: W. W. Norton, 2017).

List of poems

Memoirs

• The Long Goodbye, memoir (New York: Riverhead, 2011).

Anthologies

• ed. A World Out of Reach: Dispatches from Life Under Lockdown (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020)

References

Sources

• Contemporary Authors Online. The Gale Group, 2006.

Further reading

• Brouwer, Joel (April 29, 2007). "Fields of memory". The New York Times. Review of Halflife.

External links

• Website: Official website
• Excerpt: An excerpt from The Long Goodbye, in The New Yorker.
• Audio: Meghan O'Rourke reads "Spectacular" from the book Halflife (via poemsoutloud.net)
• Audio: Meghan O'Rourke reading from Halflife at the Key West Literary Seminar, 2008. (.mp3 / 15:44)
• "Chemotherapy," a poem by Meghan O'Rourke published in Guernica Magazine
• Meghan O'Rourke on Twitter