An Evening with Sarah Broom

Sponsored by The Stanford Storytelling Project and The McCoy Center for Ethics in Society

Join us for a special evening with Sarah M. Broom, author of The Yellow House, winner of the 2019 National Book Award and featured on dozens of 2019 Best Books lists. Through the intimate story of her family’s home, The Yellow House offers a new story about not only New Orleans but about defying the forces of race and class in the American neighborhoods we rarely see.  Broom will read from her work and discuss how its blend of memoir, journalism, and historical analysis offers us a way to recover from the mythologies that so frequently distort our understanding of ourselves and our country. 

 Sarah M. Broom’s work has appeared in the New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Oxford American, and O, The Oprah Magazine among others. A native New Orleanian, she received her Masters in Journalism from the University of California, Berkeley in 2004. She was awarded a Whiting Foundation Creative Nonfiction Grant in 2016 and was a finalist for the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Creative Nonfiction in 2011. She has also been awarded fellowships at Djerassi Resident Artists Program and The MacDowell Colony. She lives in New York State.

“Every few years, a book comes along that teaches readers of memoir how to read and writers of memoir how to write. Calling Sarah Broom’s The Yellow House a memoir feels wrong. Somehow, Broom created a book that feels bigger, finer, more daring than the form itself.” 

— Kiese Laymon