Jeff Sharlet
Jeff Sharlet is the New York Times bestselling author and editor of eight books of creative nonfiction and photography, including The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War, The Family—adapted into a Netflix documentary series of the same name hosted by Sharlet—and This Brilliant Darkness: A Book of Strangers. Sharlet is a contributing editor for Vanity Fair, Harper's, and Rolling Stone, and an editor-at-large for VQR. He has also written for The New York Times Magazine, GQ, Esquire, The Atlantic, The Nation, The New Republic, New York, Bookforum, and other publications. His writing on Russia’s anti-LGBTQIA+ crusade earned the National Magazine Award and his writing on anti-LGBTQIA+ campaigns in Uganda earned the Molly National Journalism Prize, the Outright International’s Outspoken Award, and the Americans United Person of the Year Award, among others. He has served as a Nonfiction Panel Chair for the National Book Award and received multiple fellowships from MacDowell. Sharlet is the Frederick Sessions Beebe ’35 Professor in the Art of Writing at Dartmouth College. He lives in Vermont, where he is trying to learn the names of plants.
“I read as easily as I breathe.”
“Talking with her was like listening to a ballad on a radio station that fades in and out as you drive, sometimes clear and sentimental and tuned perfectly to the passing land, sometimes filled with static, lost, a song played too many times.”
“American fundamentalism’s original sentiments were as radically democratic in theory as they have become repressive in practice, its dream not that of Christian theocracy but of a return to the first century of Christ worship, before there was a thing called Christianity. The “age of miracles,” when church was no more than a word for the great fellowship—the profound friendship—of believers, when Christ’s testament really was new, revelation was unburdened by history, and believers were martyrs or martyrs-to-be, pure and beautiful.”
“That's religion in America, under constant revision.”
“. . . private group prayers were the modern equivalent of a backroom cigar.”