Meghan Daum

Last updated
Meghan Daum
Meghan Daum 2015.jpg
Daum at the 2015 Texas Book Festival
Born (1970-02-13) February 13, 1970 (age 53)
California
OccupationColumnist
NationalityAmerican
Education Vassar College
Columbia University (MFA)
GenreNovelist, essayist
Website
www.meghandaum.com

Meghan Elizabeth Daum (born February 13, 1970) is an American author, essayist, podcaster, and journalist.

Contents

Childhood and education

Although she was born in California, Daum grew up in Austin, Texas, and Ridgewood, New Jersey. She received her bachelor's degree from Vassar College and her Master of Fine Arts degree from Columbia University. [1]

Career

Daum spent much of her twenties in New York City. In 1999, she moved to Lincoln, Nebraska, and the experience became the catalyst for her 2003 novel The Quality of Life Report, which follows the life and times of an ambitious young television journalist who trades New York for the fictional town of Prairie City and explores themes of social class in America as well as the contradictions of the "simplicity movement." She is also the author of two collections of essays, My Misspent Youth and The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion, which was named as a top 10 books of the year by Slate and Entertainment Weekly. [2] It won the 2015 PEN CENTER USA Literary Award for Creative Nonfiction.

Her work has appeared in The New Yorker , The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Vogue, GQ, Harper's and elsewhere.

Daum lives in Los Angeles, California, and New York City. She has been an opinion columnist for the Los Angeles Times since 2005. She is a member of the adjunct faculty in the writing division of the School of the Arts at Columbia University.

Daum is a 2015 Guggenheim Fellow in general nonfiction [3] and the recipient of 2016 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in creative writing. In 2017 she served as the Bedell Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Iowa's Nonfiction Writing Program. [4]

In 2020, Daum started a podcast for discussing complicated and controversial issues, The Unspeakable.

Books

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elizabeth Bishop</span> American poet and short-story writer (1911–1979)

Elizabeth Bishop was an American poet and short-story writer. She was Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1949 to 1950, the Pulitzer Prize winner for Poetry in 1956, the National Book Award winner in 1970, and the recipient of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1976. Dwight Garner argued that she was perhaps "the most purely gifted poet of the 20th century".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Susan Orlean</span> American journalist and author

Susan Orlean is an American journalist, television writer, and bestselling author of The Orchid Thief and The Library Book. She has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1992, and has contributed articles to many magazines including Vogue, Rolling Stone, Esquire, and Outside. In 2021, Orlean joined the writing team of HBO comedy series How To with John Wilson.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peter Gay</span> German-American historian and author

Peter Joachim Gay was a German-American historian, educator, and author. He was a Sterling Professor of History at Yale University and former director of the New York Public Library's Center for Scholars and Writers (1997–2003). He received the American Historical Association's (AHA) Award for Scholarly Distinction in 2004. He authored over 25 books, including The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, a two-volume award winner; Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (1968), a bestseller; and the widely translated Freud: A Life for Our Time (1988).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Laila Lalami</span> Moroccan-American writer, and professor (born 1968)

Laila Lalami is a Moroccan-American novelist, essayist, and professor. After earning her licence ès lettres degree in Morocco, she received a fellowship to study in the United Kingdom (UK), where she earned an MA in linguistics.

Lucy Sante is a Belgian-born American writer, critic, and artist. She is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. Her books include Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York (1991).

Lillian Faderman is an American historian whose books on lesbian history and LGBT history have earned critical praise and awards. The New York Times named three of her books on its "Notable Books of the Year" list. In addition, The Guardian named her book, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers, one of the Top 10 Books of Radical History. She was a professor of English at California State University, Fresno, which bestowed her emeritus status, and a visiting professor at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She retired from academe in 2007. Faderman has been referred to as "the mother of lesbian history" for her groundbreaking research and writings on lesbian culture, literature, and history.

Deborah Solomon is an American art critic, journalist and biographer. She sometimes writes for the New York Times, where she was previously a columnist. Her weekly column, "Questions For" ran in The New York Times Magazine from 2003 to 2011. Later, she was the art critic for WNYC Public Radio, the New York City affiliate of NPR. She is sometimes confused with another reporter, Deborah B. Solomon, who is a financial journalist now working at The New York Times after a long career at The Wall Street Journal.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Meghan O'Rourke</span> American poet

Meghan O'Rourke is an American nonfiction writer, poet and critic.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Isabel Wilkerson</span> American journalist

Isabel Wilkerson is an American journalist and the author of The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration (2010) and Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (2020). She is the first woman of African-American heritage to win the Pulitzer Prize in journalism.

Maureen Theresa Howard was an American novelist, memoirist, and editor. Her award-winning novels feature women protagonists and are known for formal innovation and a focus on the Irish-American experience.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Honor Moore</span> American poet

Honor Moore is an American writer of poetry, creative nonfiction and plays. She currently teaches at The New School in the MFA program for creative nonfiction, where she is a part-time associate teaching professor.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nicholas Delbanco</span> American writer

Nicholas Delbanco is an American writer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Terese Svoboda</span> American poet

Terese Svoboda is an American poet, novelist, memoirist, short story writer, librettist, translator, biographer, critic and videomaker.

Melissa Febos is an American writer and professor. She is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir, Whip Smart (2010), and the essay collections, Abandon Me (2017) and Girlhood (2021).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Leslie Jamison</span> American novelist and essayist

Leslie Sierra Jamison is an American novelist and essayist. She is the author of the 2010 novel The Gin Closet and the 2014 essay collection The Empathy Exams. Jamison also directs the non-fiction concentration in writing at Columbia University's School of the Arts.

Brenda Wineapple is an American nonfiction writer, literary critic, and essayist who has written several books on nineteenth-century American writers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Paisley Rekdal</span> American poet

Paisley Rekdal is an American poet who is currently serving as Poet Laureate of Utah. She is the author of a book of essays entitled The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee: Observations on Not Fitting In, the memoir Intimate, as well as six books of poetry. For her work, she has received numerous fellowships, grants, and awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, a Civitella Ranieri Residency, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Pushcart Prizes in both 2009 and 2013, Narrative's Poetry Prize, the AWP Creative Nonfiction Prize, and several other awards from the state arts council. She has been recognized for her poems and essays in The New York Times Magazine, American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, The New Republic, Tin House, the Best American Poetry series, and on National Public Radio, among others. She was also a recipient of a 2019 Academy of American Poets' Poets Laureate Fellowship.

Mary Cappello is a writer and professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Rhode Island. She is the author of five books of literary nonfiction, and her essays and experimental prose have been published in The Georgia Review, Salmagundi and Cabinet Magazine. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Salon, The Huffington Post, in guest author blogs for Powell's Books, and on six separate occasions as Notable Essay of the Year in Best American Essays. A 2011 Guggenheim Fellow in Creative Arts/Nonfiction, she recently received a 2015 Berlin Prize from The American Academy in Berlin, a fellowship awarded to scholars, writers, composers, and artists who represent the highest standards of excellence in their fields.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Maud Casey</span> American novelist

Maud Casey is an American novelist, and professor of creative writing at University of Maryland, College Park.

Leila Philip is an American writer, poet and educator. She is the author of award-winning books of nonfiction which have received glowing national reviews. Her books include: Beaverland: How One Weird Rodent Made America, A Family Place: A Hudson Valley Farm, Three Centuries, Five Wars, One Family, Hidden Dialogue: A Discussion Between Women in Japan and the United States, The Road Through Miyama) and one collection of poetry. Philip has been anthologized in a number of books, including: Brief Encounters, Teaching Creative Non-Fiction, Maiden Voyages: Writings of Women Travelers; Family Travels: The Farther You Go the Closer You Get; Japan: True Stories of Life on the Road, A Woman's Passion for Travel. She has contributed articles and reviews to newspapers, magazines, research and journals including Ploughshares, The Christian Science Monitor, Studio Potter Magazine, the Yomiuri Shimbun and the Daily Yomiuri. Philip was a contributing columnist at TheBoston Globe. She has written about art for Artcritical, Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas and Art in America. She is the Contributing Editor of Riverteeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative. In 2018, with writer Robin Hemley, she founded the online journal Speculative Nonfiction.

References

  1. Lee, Linda. "A NIGHT OUT WITH: Meghan Daum; No Escaping the City", The New York Times , June 1, 2003. Accessed September 22, 2015. "Among the crowd were chums from her days at Vassar and from the M.F.A. writing program at Columbia, and her parents. (She grew up in Ridgewood, N.J.)"
  2. David Haglund, Dan Kois, Katy Waldman (December 4, 2014). "The Top 10 Books of the Year". Slate Magazine.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  3. "Meghan Daum, 2015 Guggenheim Fellow".
  4. "Live From Prairie Lights: Meghan Daum". writersworkshop.uiowa.edu. Archived from the original on 2017-10-11. Retrieved 2017-06-03.