“Mathews is simultaneously hilarious, tender and meaningful.” —Los Angeles Times
Sarah Thankam Mathews grew up between Oman and India, immigrating to the United States at seventeen. Her work tackles big questions with pragmatism, and Entertainment Weekly calls her a “new literary star.”
Sarah’s first novel, All This Could Be Different, was a 2022 National Book Award Finalist, shortlisted for the 2022 National Book Award and the 2022 Discover Prize, nominated for the Aspen Literary Prize, and was named one of the Best Books of 2022 by NPR, Vulture, Harper’s Bazaar, and more. Her novel was also a Los Angeles Times Top 5 Fiction Books of the Year, one of TIME and Slate’s Top 10 Books of the Year, and was called “One of the buzziest, most human novels of the year” by Vogue.
Formerly a Rona Jaffe Fellow in fiction at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, and a Margins Fellow at The Asian American Writers Workshop, Sarah’s work has appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s Bazaar, SSENSE, Lux Magazine, Best American Short Stories 2020, The Kenyon Review, Barrelhouse, the Juggernaut, and Autostraddle.
In 2020, Sarah founded Bed-Stuy Strong, a mutual aid network and online community created in response to the COVID-19 crisis with the belief that every person deserves to have their survival needs met. From March 2020 until June 2021, Bed-Stuy Strong built and maintained a grassroots COVID-19 food security operation to attempt to address some fraction of the skyrocketing community need around hunger. Their work supported 28,000 people in Central Brooklyn with a week’s supply of home-delivered groceries, and it raised and redistributed the equivalent of $1.3M in grassroots crowdsourced donations back into the community.
Sarah is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
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