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Meghan O'Rourke (born 1976 in Brooklyn, New York) is an American nonfiction writer, poet and critic.

Background and education
O'Rourke was born April 16, 1976 in Brooklyn, New York. The eldest of three children born to Paul and Barbara O’Rourke, she had two younger brothers. Both of her parents were educators. Her mother was a longtime teacher and administrator at Saint Ann’s, an elite independent school in Brooklyn, and later became headmaster of the Pierrepoint School in Westport, Connecticut. Her father, a classicist and Egyptologist, also taught at Saint Ann’s and Pierrepont. O’Rourke grew up in Brooklyn and spent many summers in Vermont. A serious child, she developed an early love of books. She discovered an interest in writing at the age of five after her mother gave her a notebook with blank pages where she could write down interesting things.

O’Rourke attended St. Ann’s through high school. She earned a bachelor’s of arts degree in English language and literature from Yale University in 1997. She later returned to school and earned a master of fine arts degree in poetry from Warren Wilson College in 2005.

Journalism
Immediately after graduating from Yale, O'Rourke began an internship as an editor at The New Yorker. She was promoted to fiction/nonfiction editor in 2000, becoming one of the youngest-ever editors at the publication. During this time, she also freelanced as a contributing editor of the literary quarterly Grand Street, In 2002 O’Rourke moved to Slate, an online magazine that covers news, culture, and politics. She served as culture and literary editor there from late 2002 to mid-2009 and was a founding editor of DoubleX, a section on Slate that focused on women’s issues. She also continued to moonlight with other publications; from 2005 to 2010 she was a poetry coeditor of the Paris Review She is also an occasional contributor to The New York Times. O'Rourke has written on a wide range of topics, including horse racing, gender bias in the literary world, the politics of marriage and divorce, and the place of grief and mourning in modern society. She has published poems in literary journals and magazines including The New Yorker, Best American Poetry, The New Republic, and Poetry, along with Perrine's Literatures Twelfth Edition.

Her first book of poems, Halflife, was published by Norton in 2007. O'Rourke's book, The Long Goodbye, a memoir of grief and mourning written after the death of her mother, was published to wide critical acclaim in April 2011. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. O'Rourke suffers from an autoimmune disorder which she has written about for The New Yorker. She is working on a book about chronic illness. She has been treated for Lyme disease.

On July 1, 2019, O'Rourke became editor of The Yale Review, coinciding with the 200th anniversary of its founding.

Awards and fellowships

 * 2014: Guggenheim Award for General Nonfiction
 * 2008: May Sarton Poetry Prize
 * 2007: Lannan Literary Award
 * 2005: Union League and Civic Arts Foundation Award from the Poetry Foundation
 * 2017: Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant to complete her book, What's Wrong With Me? The Mysteries of Chronic Illness

Poetry

 * Collections


 * Once: Poems (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011).
 * Sun In Days ((New York: W. W. Norton, 2017).
 * Sun In Days ((New York: W. W. Norton, 2017).


 * List of poems

Memoirs

 * The Long Goodbye, memoir (New York: Riverhead, 2011).

Critical studies and reviews of O'Rourke's work

 * Review of Halflife.