Meet Emily

Emily Rapp Black is the author of Poster Child: A Memoir (BloomsburyUSA); The Still Point of the Turning World (Penguin Press),which was New York Times bestseller, Editor’s Pick, and a finalist for the PEN-USA Award; Sanctuary (Random House), a New York Times Editor’s Pick; Frida Kahlo and My Left Leg (Nottinghill Editions/New York Review of Books); and I Would Die If I Were You: Notes on Art and Truthtelling (Counterpoint, 2026)A former Fulbright scholar, she was educated at Harvard University, Trinity College-Dublin, Saint Olaf College, and the University of Texas-Austin, where she was a James A. Michener Fellow in Fiction and Poetry. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, she has received awards and fellowships from the Rona Jaffe Foundation; the Jentel Arts Foundation; the Corporation of Yaddo; the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, where she was a winter writing fellow; Fundacion Valparaiso in Mojacar, Spain; and Bucknell University, where she was the Philip Roth fiction writer-in-residence. Her work has appeared in VOGUE, the New York Times, Die Zeit, The Times-London, Lenny Letter, The Sun, TIME, the Boston Globe, the Wall Street Journal, O the Oprah Magazine, the Los Angeles Times and many other publications. She is currently Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California-Riverside, where she also teaches in the School of Medicine. She lives in Southern California.

Emily Rapp Black’s I Would Die If I Were You is a reminder that there are intellectual and emotional frequencies that can only be explored through books. In big-hearted, sharply crafted chapter after chapter, Emily Rapp Black dares us to wander through the ways art, reckoning and sadness are not at all finite, though they are necessarily forever. The writing and ideas here, particularly at the ends of chapters, are just absolutely exquisite. I dare any twenty-first century reader to show me a writer whose endings are better than Emily black. Fuck you, Ai. You could never ever do this.
— Kiese Laymon, author of HEAVY

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Books

In these pages, Emily Rapp Black excavates the meaning of ‘resilience,’ putting aside brittle clichés about heroism and strength to uncover a richer, messier, more beautiful picture of what it means to live amidst both love and loss. This a lyrical, deep, funny, eyes-wide-open, ultimately comforting book. I adored it, and — if you are searching for how to live in a broken world — so will you.
— Lucy Kalanithi

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