Sarah Viren is the author of the memoir Naming the Bigger Lie, the essay collection MINE, which won the River Teeth Nonfiction Book Prize, and translator of Cordoba Skies, a novella by Argentine writer Federico Falco. With Lina María Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas, Sarah is editor of the forthcoming anthology Essaying the Americas. She is currently an assistant professor of creative writing at Arizona State University.

“It’s hard to imagine my life without Iowa. I moved there after six years as a newspaper reporter in the South, at a time when I pretty much felt stuck. And then suddenly I was living in a house with a musician, a sculptor, a playwright, two cats, and a dog. I was sleeping on a bed I made myself out of foam core doors and relearning to climb trees. I was reading Montaigne and Jenny Boully and Maggie Nelson and talking to new friends about Montaigne and Boully and Nelson and what an essay is, or could be. I was also learning to speak a new language, beginning to edit and teach, translating literature, falling in love, getting married (in one of the only states at the time that allowed same-sex marriage), and—eventually—having a kid. Not that the NWP offers you ALL of that, but it does exist in a mini-universe where creative nonfiction writers feel what it would be like if the world were filled with people who love the essay as much as they do. And for me that made all the difference.”