Sarah M. Broom’s writing has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, the Oxford American, and O, The Oprah magazine among others. She received her Master’s in Journalism from the University of California, Berkeley. She was awarded a Whiting Foundation Creative Nonfiction Grant in 2016. She has also been awarded fellowships at Djerassi Resident Artists Program and The MacDowell Colony. She is author of The Yellow House (Grove Press). In 1961, Sarah M. Broom’s mother Ivory Mae bought a shotgun house in the then-promising neighborhood of New Orleans East and built her world inside of it. Widowed, Ivory Mae remarried Sarah’s father Simon Broom; their combined family would eventually number twelve children. But after Simon died, six months after Sarah’s birth, the Yellow House would become Ivory Mae’s thirteenth and most unruly child. A book of great ambition, Sarah M. Broom’s The Yellow House tells a hundred years of her family and their relationship to home in a neglected area of one of America’s most mythologized cities. This is the story of a mother’s struggle against a house’s entropy, and that of a prodigal daughter who left home only to reckon with the pull that home exerts, even after the Yellow House was wiped off the map after Hurricane Katrina. The Yellow House is a brilliant memoir of place, class, race, the seeping rot of inequality, and the internalized shame that often follows.
