About
Megan Harlan is an award-winning writer, essayist, and author of two books. Mobile Home: A Memoir in Essays (University of Georgia Press, 2020) won the 2019 AWP Award for Creative Nonfiction and the 2021 Independent Book Publishers Award’s Gold Medal in Creative Nonfiction, and was a finalist for the 2021 Northern California Book Award in Creative Nonfiction. Kirkus Reviews called Mobile Home “graceful … sharply observed forays into the mazes of the past,” Booklist praised it as “fascinating and lyrical memoir,” and the The New York Times Book Review wrote, “Impermanence … is a resonant ache in this linked-essay memoir.” Her poetry collection, Mapmaking (BkMk Press/New Letters), was awarded the John Ciardi Prize for Poetry and described by Alice Fulton as “a miracle of invention.”
Harlan’s essays have won the Arts & Letters Susan Atefat Prize for Creative Nonfiction, been cited as distinguished in Best American Essays 2018, 2019, 2021, and 2023, and have appeared in AGNI, Alaska Quarterly Review, Hotel Amerika, River Teeth, Cincinnati Review, Arts & Letters, The Smart Set, The Common, Superstition Review, Catamaran, and Under the Sun, among other publications. Her poems appear in American Poetry Review, Crazyhorse, Los Angeles Review, Prairie Schooner, Beloit Poetry Journal, Hotel Amerika, TriQuarterly, PBS NewsHour Poetry Series, Poetry Daily, and Verse Daily, among other publications, and won the Confrontation Poetry Prize. She has regularly contributed travel features, literary criticism, and journalism to magazines and newspapers that include The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, ELLE, Salon, Publishers Weekly, and Entertainment Weekly. Her short stories have been published in Alaska Quarterly Review, Cimarron Review, Meridian, Painted Bride Quarterly, and Sycamore Review. She is the founder and editor of Farsickness, an online journal of literary travel, where she publishes creative nonfiction by and interviews with writers for whom place is central to their work. Her newsletter, The France House, explores her experiences making a second home in Brittany, where she lives and writes for part of the year.
Harlan holds a master’s degree from New York University’s Creative Writing Program (where she was awarded Writers Fellowships) and a B.A. in English with honors from Tufts University. Born in Vermont, she grew up in Saudi Arabia, Colombia, London, Houston, Alaska, and the San Francisco Bay Area. Since college, she’s traveled to five continents, has called Manhattan and San Francisco home, and now lives with her husband and son in Berkeley, California, and Brittany, France.
