Sarah Viren is a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine and author of the essay collection "Mine," which won the River Teeth Book Prize and the GLCA New Writers Award and was named one of LitHub's favorite books of 2018. She was a finalist for a National Magazine Award for her essay "The Accusation," published in 2020 in the New York Times Magazine.
Her scholarly focuses include the literary essay and literary translation. Her translation of the novella "Córdoba Skies" by the Argentine author Federico Falco was published in 2016 by Ploughshares Solos, and her co-edited anthology of the essay in the Americas, "The Great American Essay," is forthcoming from Mad Creek Books. She also has a memoir, "To Name the Bigger Lie," that will be published by Scribner in June 2023. Viren's work has been supported by a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Kerouac House Residency, and a Fulbright student grant to Colombia. She holds a doctorate from Texas Tech University and a master's of fine arts degree from the University of Iowa.
My scholarship and creative writing are inextricable from larger national and international conversations about truth and representation, and my current book projects—a work of narrative nonfiction about Holocaust denialism and an anthology of the essay in the Americas—both engage with these issues in different ways. These projects rely on my background as a journalist as well as my later training as a literary translator, but at their heart is my love for the genre of creative nonfiction and all its manifestations, from literary journalism to travel writing to video essays.
The nonfiction book project, To Name the Bigger Lie, is a hybrid work that mixes literary journalism and historical research with memoir writing—specifically my own experience with an influential high school philosophy teacher who encouraged me and other students to “question” the Holocaust. Based on dozens of interviews with former classmates and teachers, and research into the history and growing popularity of Holocaust denialism, this book serves as an allegory for understanding the rise in conspiratorial thinking and authoritarianism in the world today.
My second project, the anthology Essaying the Americas, will be published by Mad Creek Press, an imprint of Ohio State University Press. The first anthology of the essay in the Americas, this collection addresses my interest in genre and representation in a more critical way. Responding to the recent “inter-American” turn in literary scholarship, this anthology, which I am editing with the writer and translator Lina Ferreira, seeks to broaden—and we hope deepen—that discussion by offering up a genealogy of the essay from South, Central, and North America. Selected essays include writing previously categorized under labels such as myth, testimonio, and comic, and by writers often left out of essay canons, especially those who are indigenous, queer, and people of color.
Other creative and scholarly interests include podcasting (my podcast "The Inbox" was the opening segment in the new The 11th podcast series from Pineapple Street Studios) and climate narratives.
