Sarah Chihaya is an American writer, professor, and literary critic. In 2020, she was one of several co-authors of The Ferrante Letters: An Experiment in Collective Criticism, published by Columbia University Press. [1] In 2025, she released her debut memoir, Bibliophobia, with Random House. [2]
Chihaya grew up in Ohio as the child of Japanese and Japanese-Canadian immigrants. [3]
Chihaya's book reviews, interviews, and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Nation, The Yale Review, and other publications. [4] [5] [6] [7] [8]
Chihaya has served as an English professor at Princeton University. [9] [10] She has also taught at the University of California, Berkeley and New York University. [11]
In 2020, Chihaya was the co-author of The Ferrante Letters: An Experiment in Collective Criticism alongside Merve Emre, Katherine Hill, and Juno Jill Richards. [12] The book was published by Columbia University Press. [1]
In 2023, Chihaya had earned a Whiting Award in Creative Nonfiction for her then-forthcoming debut memoir Bibliophobia. The judges stated: "Soul-baring, witty, and slyly provocative, Bibliophobia unsettles our most widespread and unexamined beliefs about books and reading." [13]
In 2025, Chihaya released Bibliophobia, which discusses her complicated relationships to books along with several difficult experiences in her life. [14] The New Republic called it "a welcome splash of lemony sourness to cut the bland sweetness of much popular discourse about books, which can tend toward boosterism, bibliotherapy, or... a nostalgic relation to books as objects and symbols that sometimes has little to do with the actual practice of reading." [15]