Sarah Stone

Sarah Stone's new novel, Hungry Ghost Theater appeared on the Millions Most Anticipated list for October 2018 and LitHub’s 21 Books You Should Read This October and was a finalist for the 38th Annual Northern California Book Award in fiction. The San Francisco Chronicle said, “Prepare to be seduced straightaway by the sensuous beauty and penetrating wisdom of Sarah Stone’s second novel….Set in our Bay Area, in Zanzibar, Seoul and later in what another reviewer calls ‘a series of Tibetan and Sumerian hells,’ Hungry Ghost’s too-real souls may linger to gently haunt: their fierce particulars accruing to reveal, by book’s end, a lustrous vision.”

Her previous novel, The True Sources of the Nile, has been taught in courses on literature, ethics, and the rhetoric of human rights. It was a BookSense 76 selection, has been translated into German and Dutch, and was included in Geoff Wisner’s A Basket of Leaves: 99 Books That Capture the Spirit of Africa. She’s the co-author, with her spouse and writing partner Ron Nyren, of the textbook Deepening Fiction: A Practical Guide for Intermediate and Advanced Writers. Her stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in Scoundrel Time; Ploughshares; StoryQuarterly; The Believer; the San Francisco Chronicle; The Millions; The Writer’s Chronicle; Dedicated to the People of Darfur: Writings on Fear, Risk, and Hope; and A Kite in the Wind: Fiction Writers on Their Craft, among other places.

She has been awarded fellowships from the University of Michigan, where she received her MFA, and the Bread Loaf and Sewanee writers’ conferences. She has taught at UC Berkeley, at San Francisco State, and for the Warren Wilson MFA Program, among other places. She is currently teaching in the online creative writing program for Stanford Continuing Studies and working with writers individually. Earlier in her life, she worked as a psychiatric aide in a locked facility, a graveyard-shift waitress in the restaurant where everyone went after they’d been thrown out of all the bars in town, and an office worker in an apparently haunted massage/bodywork school in the Santa Cruz mountains. She has also written for Korean public television, reported on human rights in Burundi, and looked after orphan chimpanzees at the Jane Goodall Institute.