“What’s important as a journalist is to be clear about who you are: try and understand your own biases, and be clear about your own identity.” Sarah Mirk by Audra McNamee
Sarah Mirk
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Sarah Mirk is a graphic journalist, editor, and teacher. She is the author of Guantanamo Voices (Abrams, 2020), an illustrated oral history of Guantanamo Bay prison. She is also a zine-maker and illustrator whose comics have been featured in The Nib, The New Yorker, Bitch, and NPR. Sarah began her career as a reporter for alternative weekly newspapers The Stranger and The Portland Mercury. From 2013 to 2017, she worked as the online editor of national feminism and pop culture nonprofit Bitch Media. Starting in January 2017, she moved on to become a contributing editor at graphic journalism website The Nib, and also works as a writer on The Nib’s animation series, which garnered nine million views its first season. Comics she edited for The Nib were nominated for two Eisners in 2020. Mirk currently also works as a digital engagement producer for Reveal at the Center for Investigative Reporting. She co-wrote the investigative comics series In/Vulnerable, illustrated by Thi Bui, which won an RFK Human Rights Award for Journalism in 2021. She is the author of several books, including You Do You: Figuring Out Your Body, Dating, and Sexuality (Lerner, 2019), Sex from Scratch: Making Your Own Relationship Rules (Microcosm, 2014), Open Earth (Limerence Press, 2018), and the self-published collection Year of Zines (2020). She is an adjunct professor in Portland State University’s MFA program in Art and Social Practice, where she teaches a graduate seminar on writing and research. Mirk holds a degree in history, with honors, from Grinnell College. She identifies as white, cisgender, and queer. In her free time, she befriends strangers’ dogs.
