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Sara Jaffe

Sara Jaffe is a fiction writer who currently resides in Portland, Oregon. She published her first novel, Dryland, through Tin House Books in September 2015. She earned her BA at Wesleyan University and her MFA at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Currently, she is focusing on writing a collection of short fiction, Hurricane Envy. Her previous short fiction and essays have appeared in Catapult, Fence, BOMB, NOON, matchbook, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. In addition to her writing work, she played guitar for post-punk band Erase Errata from 1994 to 2004. This led to her co-editing The Art of Touring, an anthology of musicians' writing and visual art. She identifies as queer and writes about the need for more gay figures in culture and media in her essay "Summer Friction" published on the Powell's Books blog in 2015.

Career

Jaffe also co-founded New Herring Press, a publisher of prose chapbooks, with Jess Arndt, Sara Marcus, and Jason Daniel Swartz in 2010. She was a visiting assistant professor of fiction at the University of Oregon in fall 2016. She teaches writing at Portland State University and Pacific Northwest College of Art.

Dryland

Dryland is Jaffe's debut novel. It centers on a 15-year-old girl's coming-of-age story as she joins her school's swim team and discovers she is gay. MacArthur Genius Grant winner and writer Maggie Nelson called Dryland "part diary, part dream" in which "realism brushes ever so softly against the allegorical, making the novel shimmer." Jaffe's musical background surfaces in the Book Notes piece she wrote to accompany the novel, citing tracks by mostly alternative rock artists, from Sonic Youth to Kurt Vile.

Bibliography

Dryland (2015)

Hurricane Envy (forthcoming)