Sarah Menkedick is a literary journalist and the author of Homing Instincts: Early Motherhood on a Midwestern Farm and Ordinary Insanity: Fear and the Silent Crisis of Motherhood in America. Her writing has been featured in Harper’s, the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, Time, Pacific Standard, the Guardian, Oxford American, and elsewhere. She was a 2015-2016 Fulbright Fellow in Oaxaca, Mexico, and has been the recipient of numerous writing awards and grants. Her first book was longlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, and her essays have been nominated three times for The Best American Essays. Her newsletter “Terms of endearment,” which features weekly essays about art, motherhood, travel, education, and meditation, is a Substack bestseller.

After spending a decade living, teaching, writing, and traveling overseas on a shoestring, trekking alone across South America and camping on wild beaches in Borneo, the last topic Sarah imagined her first published book would address was…motherhood. But she’s never shied away from being unconventional and jumping headlong into areas deemed off-limits. After realizing how marginalized motherhood was and is as a subject of art and literature, and discovering her first book, Homing Instincts: Early Motherhood on a Midwestern Farm, shelved in the children’s section of a major bookstore, she became a fierce advocate for motherhood as an experience worthy of critical inquiry and the devotion of contemporary artists.

Her second book, Ordinary Insanity: Fear and the Silent Crisis of Motherhood in America, is an exploration of the neurobiological, psychological, social, historical, and spiritual roots of an epidemic of anxiety among American mothers. It received stellar reviews in both the New York Times and the New York Review of Books. In a Los Angeles Times op-ed that went viral, Sarah declared that she would embrace the “birth beat,” even though many female writers have paid a high price for doing so. Her writing has helped shift the American cultural reception and perception of birth and motherhood as worthwhile artistic subjects.

Sarah lived in Mexico for five years and has spent the past fifteen years traveling and working between Pittsburgh and Oaxaca, Mexico, with her Oaxacan husband and Oaxacan-American daughter. Her life between cultures and countries, and extensive experience abroad, give her a unique lens on American culture. Her writing on immigration challenges stereotypes about Mexican immigrants and asks readers to consider what makes a meaningful life. Her 2015-2016 Fulbright grant in Oaxaca, Mexico focused on how Mexican Americans navigate life between identities, cultures, and dreams, and led into a larger body of work questioning American achievement culture. She speaks fluent Spanish, French, and Portuguese.

Her current work focuses on the post-pandemic crisis facing American education and how to remake schools for the 21st century to prioritize children’s humanity, dignity, justice, and imagination. This work draws heavily on research and reporting from abroad, arguing the U.S. has much to learn from places with far fewer resources.