“I need the sky’s colored threads to tangle inside me, pull me somewhere new.”
MEGAN HARLAN is an award-winning nonfiction writer, poet, and author of two books. Mobile Home: A Memoir in Essays (University of Georgia Press, 2020) won both the AWP Award Series and the IPPY Gold Medal for Creative Nonfiction and garnered critical acclaim in The New York Times, Kirkus, Booklist, and elsewhere. Her first book, Mapmaking, won the John Ciardi Prize for Poetry and was called “a miracle of invention” by Alice Fulton. Her writing has been cited four times in Best American Essays and has appeared in AGNI, Crazyhorse, The New York Times, Alaska Quarterly Review, American Poetry Review, The Cincinnati Review, and Colorado Review, among other journals. After growing up in Europe, the Middle East, Latin America, and American states ranging from Alaska to Texas, Megan now divides her time between the San Francisco Bay Area and Brittany, France.
For more, visit the About page.
A Good Morning America Book Club Pick
Winner of the AWP Award Series in Creative Nonfiction
MOBILE HOME: A Memoir in Essays
(University of Georgia Press)
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
“Fascinating and lyrical memoir.”
“Impermanence…is a resonant ache in this linked-essay memoir.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“In 10 graceful essays, award-winning poet, essayist, and editor Harlan recounts her singularly nomadic childhood…Sharply observed forays into the mazes of the past.”
“Mobile Home combines the lyric, the factual, and the dramatic in a prose style that is both hugely enjoyable and deeply moving.”
—Northern California Book Awards
“Lyrical and big-hearted and thoughtful…Harlan’s nuanced take has much in common with essays by Jo Ann Beard, Annie Dillard or Maggie Nelson.”
Winner of the John Ciardi Prize for Poetry
MAPMAKING: Poems
(BkMk Press/New Letters)
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
“This is imaginative writing at its very best — visual, aural, metaphorical, ethical, and adventurous.”
—Sidney Wade, Judge, John Ciardi Prize for Poetry
“Nuanced, visionary poems … A profound meditation on the permeability of past and present, nature and artifice, self and other, Mapmaking is a miracle of invention.”
—Alice Fulton
“Megan Harlan’s work has the control of [Elizabeth] Bishop, the range and risk of [Charles] Olson, and aches with a strange fernweh — a German word she translates roughly as “farsickness.”
—John Matthias
“Supple, exacting, slippery, exuberant, diaphanous, and beguiling … Harlan’s poems are nimble and imaginatively fleet, but never far from a beating heart, a breathing and dreaming body.”
—Zayne Turner, Meridian
“Poetry that is boundless and timeless … A transparency that manages to catch the light and dazzle, while simultaneously possessing the quality of flight.”
—Bethany Carlson, Indiana Review