Theodora Wright

Theodora Wright is an author and critic whose work appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The New York Review of Books. She is the author of three books and a three-time National Book Award finalist. Her fourth book, The Undertow, was published in 2026.

Theodora Wright is an American author, journalist, and cultural critic whose work has appeared for more than two decades in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, and Harper's Magazine. Her first three books — Parallel Weather (2011), The Common Hours (2016), and Counter-Evidence (2021) — were each finalists for the National Book Award for Nonfiction. In 2022 she was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Criticism. Her fourth book, The Undertow, a study of American grief in the decade that followed 2020, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2026. She lives in upstate New York.

Theodora Wright is an American author, journalist, and cultural critic whose work over twenty-five years has mapped the intersections of memory, loss, place, and the ordinary labor of American life. Her writing appears regularly in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, Harper's Magazine, and T: The New York Times Style Magazine.

She is the author of four books: Parallel Weather: A Memoir of Place (2011), a study of the industrial Midwest told through her grandfather's decades on the assembly line; The Common Hours (2016), essays on care work and the moral geography of the American hospital; Counter-Evidence (2021), a reported book on the long aftermath of wrongful convictions; and The Undertow: Essays on American Grief, 2020–2026 (2026). Each of the first three was a finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction; in 2022 she was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Criticism.

Wright has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, and a Logan Nonfiction Fellow. She has taught as a visiting writer at the University of Iowa and at Columbia. She was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and lives with her family in Rhinebeck, New York.