Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell has turned her gimlet eye -- and razor-sharp tongue -- toward everything from her father’s homemade (and life-size) cannon and her obsession with the Godfather films, to the New Hampshire primary and her Cherokee ancestors’ forced march on the Trail of Tears. Vowell is best known for her monologues and documentaries for public radio’s This American Life. A contributing editor for the program since 1996, she has been a staple of TAL’s popular live shows around the country, for which The New York Times has commended her "funny querulous voice and shrewd comic delivery." Thanks to her first book, Radio On: A Listener's Diary, Newsweek named her its "Rookie of the Year" for non-fiction in 1997, calling her "a cranky stylist with talent to burn."

Reviewing her second book, the essay collection Take the Cannoli: Stories from the New World, People magazine said, "Wise, witty and refreshingly warm-hearted, Vowell’s essays on American history, pop culture and her own family reveal the bonds holding together a great, if occasionally weird, nation." Her third book, The Partly Cloudy Patriot, was a national bestseller. Its audio version features the voices of Norman Lear, Paul Begala, and Conan O'Brien with music by They Might Be Giants. Vowell's fourth book, titled Assassination Vacation (April 2005), is a hilarious and haunting road trip through the tourist destinations of the three assassinated American Presidents: Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley. Its audio book features Conan O’Brien, Jon Stewart, Tony Kushner and Stephen King with music by Michael Giacchino.

As a critic and reporter, Sarah Vowell has contributed to numerous newspapers and magazines, including Esquire, GQ, Los Angeles Times, The Village Voice, Spin, The New York Times Book Review and McSweeney’s. She is a former columnist for Time, Salon.com and San Francisco Weekly. Her essays appear in The Rose and the Briar, The Future Dictionary of America, Dial-A-Song: Twenty Years of They Might Be Giants, Marcel Dzama’s The Berlin Years and Richard Ross’ Waiting for the End of the World. Vowell is a fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU. She is the voice of teenage superhero Violet Parr in Brad Bird’s The Incredibles, a Pixar Animation Studios film; she produced the documentary short "Vowellet," about becoming an action figure while researching presidential assassinations, for the forthcoming Incredibles DVD. She has made numerous appearances on The Late Show with David Letterman and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and is a regular on Late Night with Conan O’Brien. She is president of the board of 826NYC, a nonprofit writing and tutoring center for students ages 6-18 in Brooklyn.