Sarah Vowell

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Jane Vowell (born December 27, 1969) is an American author, journalist, and regular contributor to the radio program This American Life on Public Radio International.

1 Background
2 Trivia
3 Bibliography
4 External radio links
5 External links

[edit] Background

Vowell was born in Muskogee, Oklahoma. She earned a B.A. from Montana State University in 1993 and an M.A. at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1996. Vowell received the Music Journalism Award in 1996.

Deemed a social observer, Vowell has made public appearances in Amsterdam, Seattle, Aspen, and has made appearances on television shows like Nightline, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and The Late Show with David Letterman. She also makes regular appearances on Late Night with Conan O'Brien. Her writing has been published in The Village Voice, Esquire, GQ, Spin, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and The San Francisco Weekly, and she has been a regular contributor to the online magazine Salon.

Vowell currently lives in Chelsea, a residential neighborhood in Manhattan. She cannot swim, is afraid of heights, and does not drive a car; she usually enlists the aid of her friends and family to drive her to plaques and graves when doing research. She suffers from celiac sprue, in which the body has an auto-immune reaction to gluten. Vowell is an atheist.[1]

Vowell is part Cherokee (about 1/8th on her mother’s side and 1/16th on her father’s side). According to Vowell, “Being at least a little Cherokee in northeastern Oklahoma is about as rare and remarkable as being a Michael Jordan fan in Chicago.” She retraced the path of the forced removal of the Cherokee from the southeastern United States to Oklahoma known as the Trail of Tears with her twin sister Amy. This was chronicled on the July 4th episode of This American Life in 1998, which was devoted entirely to the story. [2]

For the audio recording of her 2002 book, Vowell was able to call upon such friends as Conan O'Brien, Seth Green, Stephen Colbert, David Cross, Paul Begala, Michael Chabon, Norman Lear, and They Might Be Giants to contribute to the reading. The resulting excerpts were posted in McSweeney's Internet Tendency.[3]

In 2004, Vowell provided the voice of Violet Parr, the shy teenager in the Brad Bird-directed Pixar animated film The Incredibles and reprised her role for the various related video games. The makers of The Incredibles discovered Vowell from an episode of This American Life where she and her father fire a homemade cannon. Pixar made a test animation for Violet using audio from that sequence. She also provided Violet's voice for the Disney on Ice presentation, The Incredibles in a Magic Kingdom Adventure.

She also wrote and was featured in Vowellet: An Essay by Sarah Vowell included on the DVD version of The Incredibles, where she reflects on the differences between being super hero Violet and being an author of history books on the subject of assassinated presidents, and what it means to her nephew Owen.

In 2005, Vowell served as a guest columnist for the New York Times during several weeks in July, briefly filling in for Maureen Dowd.

In February 2006, Vowell, once again, served as a guest columnist for the New York Times. Most recently (April 2006). She also provided commentary in "Murder at the Fair: The Assassination of President McKinley", which is part of the History Channel miniseries, "10 Days That Unexpectedly Changed America", and served as a presenter at the 27th Annual Kentucky Women Writers Conference, which took place from April 20-23, 2006.

In September 2006, Vowell appeared as a minor character in the ABC drama Six Degrees.

In August and September of 2006, she toured around the United States as part of the Revenge Of The Book Eaters.national tour, which benefits the childrens literacy centers 826NYC, 826CHI, 826 Valencia, 826LA, 826 Michigan, and 826 Seattle.

She is currently (according to the Steven Barclay Agency website) working on her fifth book, tentatively titled "Puritan Nation".

[edit] Trivia

Vowell's twin sister Amy gave her a hair of abolitionist guerrilla warrior John Brown for Christmas, which now decorates her wall. According to her book Assassination Vacation, she gave Amy a DVD player.