Sarah M. Broom
Sarah M. Broom is an author and journalist whose debut book The Yellow House won the 2019 National Book Award for Nonfiction, establishing her as a major voice in American memoir and place-writing. Born in 1979 in New Orleans East, Louisiana, Broom was the youngest of twelve children raised by her mother Ivory Mae in a small yellow house — a structure whose physical and symbolic presence anchors her sweeping family history. She studied at the University of New Orleans and later earned a master’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism.
Her journalism career took her to New York, where she worked as an editor at O, The Oprah Magazine and as a writer for publications including The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and Oxford American. Her reporting and essays have illuminated questions of race, class, and belonging in America with particular attention to the South and the ways that place shapes identity.
The Yellow House traces more than a century of her family’s history in New Orleans East, a neighborhood that existed somewhat apart from the city’s celebrated tourist geography. The yellow house itself was destroyed in Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and Broom uses that devastation as both a literal and metaphorical event around which to organize her examination of Black American homeownership, family memory, and what it means to lose a place that was never fully valued to begin with. The book is at once a family saga, a city history, and a meditation on inheritance.
Broom has held residencies and fellowships at institutions including the Whiting Foundation and has been recognized for her contributions to American letters. She continues to write and report on the intersection of race, place, and belonging, and The Yellow House remains a landmark work of narrative nonfiction.
