Poet Meghan O'Rourke has been named the next editor of the Yale Review, succeeding acting editor Harold Augenbraum on July 1 of next year, the 200th anniversary of the journal's founding. O’Rourke will also teach a new course on the art of editing at Yale.
“We consider ourselves fortunate to have one of the country’s most accomplished literary minds to lead the Yale Review into its third century and remake it as a journal of the digital era, building on a great tradition of such editors as Wilbur Cross, John Palmer, and J. D. McClatchy,” Peter Salovey, president of Yale University, said in a statement.
O'Rourke, a poet, memoirist, and editor as well as a graduate of Yale University, got her start as an editor at the New Yorker, and has served as culture editor and literary critic for Slate as well as poetry editor for the Paris Review. She is the author of the memoir The Long Goodbye and the poetry collections Once, Halflife, and Sun In Days. She has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, two Pushcart Prizes, and the Union League Prize from the Poetry Foundation, among other awards, and has taught at New York University, Princeton, and The New School, and is currently completing a book about chronic illness.
“We’re living in a truly exciting moment in American literary culture, and the opportunities for the Yale Review as it moves into the digital age are enormous,” said O’Rourke. “I hope to continue publishing some of the best writing and thinking of our time, with a focus on exploring pressing literary and cultural issues, from the predicament of the undocumented to how the arts are responding to the opioid epidemic.”
