Headshot of Meghan O'Rourke

Poet, essayist, and memoirist Meghan O’Rourke was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1976. She is a graduate of Yale University and holds an MFA in writing from Warren Wilson College in Asheville, North Carolina. From 2005 to 2010, O’Rourke was poetry co-editor for the Paris Review, and in 2000, she was a fiction editor for the New Yorker. Since 2001, she has been a contributing writer for the online magazine Slate
 
O’Rourke’s books include The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness (2022), Sun in Days (2017), Once (2013), and Halflife (2007), a finalist for the Great Britain Forward First Book Prize. She is also author of the memoir The Long Goodbye (2011), a chronicle of mourning written after the death of her mother, and the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Radcliffe Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and a Lannan Literary Fellowship. O’Rourke is the editor of The Yale Review and teaches at Yale University.