The Yellow House

Sarah M. Broom is an American writer. Born in New Orleans in 1979, she is the youngest of 12 children. Her father, Simon, worked in maintenance for NASA in New Orleans and played the banjo and trombone in a jazz band. She studied Anthropology and Communications at the University of North Texas and holds an MA in Journalism from the University of California, Berkeley. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the New Yorker, and O, the Oprah Magazine. Broom was awarded the Whiting Foundation Creative Nonfiction Grant in 2016 and she has had fellowships at Djerassi Resident Artists Program and the MacDowell Colony. She was a finalist for the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Creative Nonfiction. Her first novel, The Yellow House, won the 2019 National Book Award for Nonfiction.

Broom’s personal journey involves reconciling a number of dualities, including history and the present, the seen and the unseen, and the personal and the cultural. For her, writing The Yellow House is framed as an act of bravery which forces her to reckon with both personal trauma and the collective trauma of Black residents of New Orleans. She documents her story as a way to preserve the memory of the Yellow House and establish New Orleans East in the historical record.