SARAH SHAY MIRK
WRITER • EDITOR • GOOD IDEAS
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About Me

Sarah Mirk is a social justice-focused writer and artist based in Portland, Oregon.

She began her career as a reporter for alternative weekly newspapers The Stranger and The Portland Mercury, where she covered local political issues and numerous colorful characters. From 2013 to 2017, she worked as the online editor of national feminism and pop culture nonprofit Bitch Media. In that role, she edited and published critical work from dozens of writers, ran social media pages with a reach of 1.5 million readers, and hosted the engaging feminist podcast Popaganda, whose 12,000 listeners tuned into episodes on topics ranging from environmental justice to reproductive rights. Starting in January 2017, she moved on to become a story editor at graphic journalism website The Nib, where she writes and edits nonfiction comics about history, politics, and identity.

She is the author of Sex from Scratch: Making Your Own Relationship Rules (Microcosm, 2014) an open-minded guide to dating that now in its second edition. Sarah also writes, draws, and edits print zines and comics, including the popular series Oregon History Comics, which tells little known and marginalized stories from Oregon’s past. She is a frequent political commentator on Oregon Public Broadcasting and has given lectures on feminism, media, and activism at colleges around the country, including Yale, Skidmore, Grinnell, University of California-San Diego, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

She is an adjunct professor in Portland State University’s MFA program in Art and Social Practice, teaching a graduate seminar on writing and research, and holds a degree, with honors, in history from Grinnell College. 

In her free time, she makes X-Files fanzines and makes friends with dogs.

Please free to get in touch about anything, anytime.

EMAIL: mirk.sarah@gmail.com

ABOUT ME

Sarah “Shay” Mirk (she/they) is a graphic journalist, editor, and teacher. She is the author of Guantanamo Voices (Abrams, 2020), an illustrated oral history of Guantanamo Bay prison, which Kirkus called “extraordinary… an eye-opening, damning indictment of one of America’s worst trespasses.” They are also a zine-maker and illustrator whose comics have been featured in The Nib, The New Yorker, Bitch, and NPR. Her book on the craft of making nonfiction comics, Creating Nonfiction Comics: The Power of Graphic Journalism (co-written with Eleri Harris), will debut from Abrams ComicsArts in 2025.

Mirk began her career as a reporter for alternative weekly newspapers The Stranger and The Portland Mercury, where she covered political issues and numerous colorful characters. From 2013 to 2017, she worked as the online editor of national feminism and pop culture nonprofit Bitch Media. In that role, she edited and published critical work from dozens of writers and hosted the engaging feminist podcast Popaganda. Starting in January 2017, she moved on to become a contributing editor at graphic journalism website The Nib, where she writes and edits nonfiction comics about history, politics, and identity. The Nib’s anthology Be Gay Do Comics won the 2020 Ignatz for Best Anthology and The Nib magazine received the 2023 Eisner Award for Best Anthology. From 2019-2023, she worked as a digital engagement producer at Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting. She co-wrote the investigative comics series In/Vulnerable, illustrated by Thi Bui, which won an RFK Human Rights Award for Journalism in 2021.

She is the author several books, including You Do You: Figuring Out Your Body, Dating, and Sexuality (Lerner, 2019),  Sex from Scratch: Making Your Own Relationship Rules (Microcosm, 2014), the graphic novel Open Earth (Limerence Press, 2018), and the self-published collection Year of Zines (2020). 

Mirk is the 2023-2024 Applied Cartooning Fellow at the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, Vermont. She is also an adjunct professor in Portland State University’s MFA program in Art and Social Practice, where she teaches a graduate seminar on writing and research.

Mirk holds a degree in history, with honors, from Grinnell College. She identifies as white, nonbinary, and queer. In her free time, she befriends strangers’ dogs.

• Read my comics for THE NIB

• Read my comics for THE NEW YORKER

CONTACT

Please free to get in touch about anything, anytime.

EMAIL: mirkdrop@gmail.com

INSTAGRAM: @mirkdrop

TWITTER: @mirkwork

NEWSLETTER: https://sarahmirk.substack.com

SPEAKING AND TEACHING: I love leading workshops! Check out my past workshops and speaking experience.

SNAIL MAIL: Sending and receiving mail is my true passion. If you want to swap zines or just send me a postcard, I always write back! Send me a letter at

Mirk Work - PO BOX 17253 - Portland, Oregon - 97217

PRESS COVERAGE OF MY WORK:

AWARDS

EXHIBITIONS

The Art of the News exhibition and symposium at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art on the University of Oregon campus: “At a time of eroded public faith in traditional news media, comics journalism has emerged as a powerful antidote to the dissemination of inaccurate information and fake news. Practitioners in this field re-assert the ethical value of truth-telling, while at the same time foregrounding the inevitably subjective dimensions involved in any act of witnessing….  The Art of the News is the first major retrospective devoted to this increasingly influential genre of visual narrative.” (2021)

Photo by Jamie Thrower

Portrait by Audra McNamee

Signing copies of Guantanamo Voices during the Art of the News exhibition at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art (2021). Photo by Delene & Co.

Photo by Jamie Thrower