About
Megan Harlan is an award-winning creative nonfiction writer, poet, and author of two books. MOBILE HOME: A MEMOIR IN ESSAYS (University of Georgia Press, 2020) won the AWP Award for Creative Nonfiction and the Independent Book Publisher Award Gold Medal for Creative Nonfiction, and was critically acclaimed 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 won the Arts & Letters Prize for Creative Nonfiction, been cited as distinguished in Best American Essays 2018, 2019, 2021, and 2023, and has appeared in AGNI, Hotel Amerika, Crazyhorse, Alaska Quarterly Review, American Poetry Review, River Teeth, and Colorado Review, among other journals. Megan lives with her family in the San Francisco Bay Area and Brittany, France.
Featured Work
Mobile Home: A Memoir in Essays
Mobile Home explores the emotional structures and metaphysical geographies of home as inspired by Megan Harlan's globe-wandering childhood—during which she lived in seventeen homes across four continents, ranging in location from the Alaskan tundra to a Colombian jungle, a posh flat in London to a doublewide trailer near the Arabian Gulf. In ten evocative linked essays, she examines cultural histories that include Bedouin nomadic traditions and modern life in wheeled mobile homes, the psychology of motels and suburban tract housing, and the lived meanings within the built landscapes of Manhattan, Stonehenge, and the Winchester Mystery House. More personally, Harlan traces the family histories that drove her parents to seek so many new horizons—and how they've shaped her: Her mother viewed houses as a kind of large-scale plastic art ever in need of renovating; while her father, a natural adventurer, loved nothing more than to travel, choosing a life of flight that also helped to mask his addiction to alcohol. Alongside Harlan's own journey today attempting to shape a flourishing, rooted world for her son, Mobile Home skillfully maps the flexible, continually inventive natures of place, family, and home.
Other Works
Awards and Recognition
- AWP Award Series for Creative Nonfiction; Arts & Letters Prize in Creative Nonfiction Independent Book Publisher Award in Creative Nonfiction; Northern California Book Reviewers Award in Creative Nonfiction, Finalist; John Ciardi Prize for Poetry; Confrontation Poetry Prize