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Sam Sax Biography, Books, and Similar Authors

Author Biography  | Interview  | Books by this Author  | Read-Alikes

Sam Sax
Photo courtesy of the poet

Sam Sax

Sam Sax Biography

Sam Sax is a queer, Jewish writer and educator. They're the author of PIG, Madness, and Bury It. Sam has received fellowships from The NEA, Poetry Foundation, The Academy of American Poets, and Yaddo, and is currently serving as an Italic Lecturer at Stanford University.



This bio was last updated on 09/02/2024. In a perfect world, we would like to keep all of BookBrowse's biographies up to date, but with many thousands of lives to keep track of it's simply impossible to do. So, if the date of this bio is not recent, you may wish to do an internet search for a more current source, such as the author's website or social media presence. If you are the author or publisher and would like us to update this biography, send the complete text and we will replace the old with the new.

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Interview

Rita Bullwinkle interviews Sam Sax about his novel, Yr Dead

In August 2022 I received an email asking if I would like to read Sam Sax's debut novel with an eye towards possibly becoming the book's editor. I said yes immediately, and read Yr Dead later that day in a single sitting. The book, which takes place entirely in the span of time between when Ezra, the protagonist of the novel, lights themself on fire and when Ezra dies, is told in lyric fragments that span both lifetimes and geography. It's a queer, Jewish, diasporic coming-of-age story that questions how our historical memory shapes our political and emotional present.

While reading the book I met everyone Ezra ever loved, every place they ever felt queer and at home, or queer and out of place. Parts of the novel read like past lives or fables, and other parts read like text messages. While the forms of the vignettes vary greatly, the texture of the prose is always lush, felt, and searingly empathetic. Yr Dead is visceral, propulsive, and at turns fluorescently beautiful and fluorescently tragic. It's been a tremendous honor to be this book's editor, and a deep pleasure to get to talk about the book, and its many brilliances, with Sam these past two years.

In advance of the book being published this August, I was delighted that Sam ...

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Books by this Author

Books by Sam Sax at BookBrowse
Yr Dead jacket
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Read-Alikes

All the books below are recommended as read-alikes for Sam Sax but some maybe more relevant to you than others depending on which books by the author you have read and enjoyed. So look for the suggested read-alikes by title linked on the right.
How we choose read-alikes

  • Kaveh Akbar

    Kaveh Akbar

    Kaveh Akbar's poems appear in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, The Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. He is the author of two poetry collections: Pilgrim Bell and Calling a Wolf a Wolf, in addition to a... (more)

    If you enjoyed:
    Yr Dead

    Try:
    Martyr!
    by Kaveh Akbar

  • Sarah Leavitt

    Sarah Leavitt

    Sarah Leavitt is the author of the graphic memoir Tangles: A Story About Alzheimer's, My Mother, and Me (Skyhorse Publishing, 2012), which is currently in production as a feature-length animation, and the award-winning ... (more)

    If you enjoyed:
    Yr Dead

    Try:
    Something, Not Nothing
    by Sarah Leavitt

We recommend 4 similar authors

View all 4 Read-Alikes

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Top Picks

  • Book Jacket: Daughters of Shandong
    Daughters of Shandong
    by Eve J. Chung
    Daughters of Shandong is the debut novel of Eve J. Chung, a human rights lawyer living in New York. ...
  • Book Jacket: The Women
    The Women
    by Kristin Hannah
    Kristin Hannah's latest historical epic, The Women, is a story of how a war shaped a generation ...
  • Book Jacket: The Wide Wide Sea
    The Wide Wide Sea
    by Hampton Sides
    By 1775, 48-year-old Captain James Cook had completed two highly successful voyages of discovery and...
  • Book Jacket: My Friends
    My Friends
    by Hisham Matar
    The title of Hisham Matar's My Friends takes on affectionate but mournful tones as its story unfolds...

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Book Jacket
In Our Midst
by Nancy Jensen
In Our Midst follows a German immigrant family’s fight for freedom after their internment post–Pearl Harbor.
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The longest journey of any person is the journey inward

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