Sarah Mesle (PhD, Northwestern) is a professor, writer, and editor based in Los Angeles, California. She is faculty at USC, Editor at Large at the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the editor of the LARB channel Avidly and the NYU short book series Avidly Reads. Prior to arriving at USC, she held post-doctoral fellowships in English at the University of Michigan and the University of California, Los Angeles.
Mesle’s many essays about writing, literature, gender, television, and more have appeared in venues such as Los Angeles Review of Books, Talking Points Memo, Guernica, InStyle magazine, and The New York TImes Magazine. She is a nineteenth-century Americanist by training and is interested, generally speaking, in the long history of the American novel and in the many ways popular culture can excite, estrange, and surprise.
She is currently at work on a collection of essays about the cultural politics of white women’s hair (under contract at Beacon Press). Her writing guide Reasons and Feeling: Writing for the Humanities Now is forthcoming from University of Chicago Press in October 2024. She grew up in rural Iowa.
She is represented by Tanya McKinnon at McKinnon Literary.
Image by Sarah Sido
Sarah Mesle 