Bio
Sarah Curtis’s debut memoir, Daughter of a Song, is forthcoming in fall ’25 from the University of Texas Tech Press. Her essays have appeared in The Threepenny Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Creative Nonfiction, Salon, the Colorado Review, the American Literary Review, Crazyhorse, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. Her work has been noted in the Best American Essays series and anthologized in River Teeth: Twenty Years of Creative Nonfiction. She holds a master’s in journalism from Boston University and an MFA in writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her writing experience spans the spectrum, from newspaper reporting to public relations and marketing to web content.
A native Southerner, Sarah lives with her family in a 170-year-old Michigan farmhouse.
Honors
“Daughter of a Gun” noted in 2018 Best American Essays, nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and anthologized in River Teeth: Twenty Years of Creative Nonfiction
First place in Rolling Stone’s College Journalism Contest, Essay and Criticism
Inspiration
Below is a short list of nonfiction books and essays that have inspired, challenged, or irritated (in a good way) me on my writing journey. Perhaps they will do the same for you.
James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
Roland Barthes, Mythologies
Rick Bragg’s family trilogy
Harrison Candelaria Fletcher, Descanso for My Father
John D’Agata and Jim Fingal, The Lifespan of a Fact
The collected works of Joan Didion
James Galvin, The Meadow
Olivia Laing, The Trip to Echo Spring and The Lonely City
Kiese Laymon, Heavy: An American Memoir
Patricia Lockwood, Priestdaddy
James McBride, The Color of Water
David Shields, Reality Hunger
Abigail Thomas, Safekeeping: Some True Stories From a Life
Lidia Yuknavitch, “Woven”
Craft
Charles Baxter, Burning Down the House
Vivian Gornick, The Situation and the Story
George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain
Sue William Silverman, Fearless Confessions: A Writer’s Guide to Memoir