Sarah Thankam Mathews
“If people ask me what I do, I say, I’m a writer and I organize sometimes. But I do think that one of the things that unites these two frames, or ways of being in the world, [is] saying to people, you matter. Actually you have value and are vast and complicated and worth paying so many different kinds of attention to. I think that’s what connects the fiction and any organizing work I’ve ever done. ”
Sarah Thankam Mathews is the author of All This Could Be Different, a New York Times Editors’ Choice and finalist for the 2022 National Book Award in Fiction. The novel was shortlisted for the Discover Prize and the Aspen Words Literary Prize, and named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, Vogue, The Los Angeles Times, and others.
Sarah’s writing has appeared in The Yale Review, New York Magazine, Lux, Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere, and was recently honored with a Lowell Thomas Gold Award, a Macdowell Fellowship and a Howard Foundation Fellowship.
The founder of Brooklyn mutual aid network Bed-Stuy Strong, and previously visiting faculty at the Iowa Writer's Workshop and Pratt University, Sarah also writes a newsletter on literature, politics, and aesthetics.
“Dazzling and wholly original…[written] with such mordant wit, insight, and specificity, it feels like watching a new literary star being born in real time.”