Sarah Manguso is the author, most recently, of the memoir The Two Kinds of Decay (2008), published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux and Granta Books. It was named an Editors' Choice by the New York Times Sunday Book Review and a Best Book of the Year by the San Francisco Chronicle and Time Out Chicago. Rights have been sold in five countries.

Manguso is also the author of the story collection Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape (2007), included with story collections by Dave Eggers and Deb Olin Unferth in McSweeney's One Hundred and Forty-Five Stories in a Small Box.

Her poetry collections are Siste Viator (2006) and The Captain Lands in Paradise (2002), which was named a Favorite Book of the Year by the Village Voice. A translated edition of her poems was published in Germany in 2009.

Her many honors include a Hodder Fellowship and the Rome Prize, and her writing has appeared in the Believer, Bookforum, Conjunctions, the London Review of Books, McSweeney's, the New Republic, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times Magazine, the Paris Review, and three volumes of the Best American Poetry series.

She has taught in the undergraduate writing program at the Pratt Institute and in the graduate writing programs at Columbia, Fairfield, and the New School.

Born and raised near Boston, she was educated at Harvard and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. A citizen of the United States and Ireland, she lives in Los Angeles.