Megan Sweeney

Megan Sweeney is Arthur F. Thurnau Associate Professor of English, Afroamerican and African Studies, and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her publications include an award-winning monograph, Reading Is My Window: Books and the Art of Reading in Women’s Prisons (2010); an edited collection, The Story Within Us: Women Prisoners Reflect on Reading (2012); numerous articles about African American literature, reading, and incarceration; and lyric essays published in Brevity, Entropy Magazine, The Normal School, and Bennington Review. Sweeney recently completed a creative nonfiction manuscript titled Mendings, and she is currently writing a book that explores the cultural and political significance of clothing worn and/or made by prisoners.

A recipient of fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan, the Ford Foundation, and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, Sweeney has also received the Class of 1923 Memorial Teaching Award (2010) and an Arthur F. Thurnau Professorship (2014), the University of Michigan’s highest award for undergraduate teaching.