John Jeremiah Sullivan

John Jeremiah Sullivan (born 1974) is an American writer, musician, teacher, and editor. He is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, a contributing editor of Harper's Magazine, and the southern editor of The Paris Review. In 2014, he edited that year's The Best American Essays, a collection in which his work has been featured in previous years. He has also served on the faculty of Columbia University, Sewanee: The University of the South, and other institutions.

Biography

Summarize

Perspective

Sullivan was born in Louisville, Kentucky to Mike Sullivan, a sportswriter. His mother is an English professor. He earned his degree in 1997 from The University of the South, in Sewanee, Tennessee.^{[citation needed]}

His first book, Blood Horses: Notes of a Sportswriter's Son, was published in 2004. It is part personal reminiscence, part elegy for his father, and part investigation into the history and culture of the thoroughbred racehorse.^[1]

His second book, Pulphead: Essays (2011),^[2] is an anthology of fourteen previously published magazine articles, with most of them "in substantially different form"^[3] for the book.

Sullivan's essay "Mister Lytle", originally published in The Paris Review, won a number of awards, including a National Magazine Award, and was anthologized in Pulphead.^[4] Sullivan recounts how he lived with Andrew Nelson Lytle, when Lytle was in his 90s, helping him with house chores and learning some wisdom about writing and life.

His original music appears on the self-titled album Life of Saturdays.

In 2017, he helped lead a small group of 8th-grade students on a scavenger hunt to resurrect lost copies of The Daily Record, the African–American newspaper at the center of a white supremacist coup d'état and massacre that occurred in his adopted home town of Wilmington, NC, in 1898.^[5] He and his team located seven total copies, all of which are digitized and available for view via the N.C. Digital Heritage Project.

In 2019, the New Yorker published Sullivan's novella, "Mother Nut," on its website.^[6]^[7]

Sullivan is married to Dr. Mariana Johnson, a film scholar and professor.^[8] They have two daughters.^{[citation needed]}

Reception

In a 2025 interview American journalist Wright Thompson stated that his favorite piece of journalistic writing is Sullivan's "The Final Comeback of Axl Rose".^[9]

Awards

2003 Eclipse Award, Blood Horses
2003 National Magazine Award, Feature Writing
2004 Whiting Award, Nonfiction
2011 National Magazine Award, Essays and Criticism, "Mister Lytle. An Essay" (The Paris Review)
2011 Pushcart Prize, Pushcart XXXV, "Mister Lytle. An Essay" (The Paris Review)
2014 James Beard Foundation's MFK Fisher Distinguished Writing Award, for "I placed a Jar in Tennessee," published in Lucky Peach.
2015 ASCAP Foundation Taylor/Virgil Thomson Award
2015 Windham–Campbell Literature Prize (Non-Fiction) valued at $150,000^[10]
2016 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant, to complete The Prime Minister of Paradise^[11]
2018 Guggenheim Fellowship