Sarah Gouda
Sarah Gouda is an Egyptian-American fiction writer and speechwriter originally from Cincinnati, Ohio. Her fiction appears or is forthcoming in Shenandoah, Epiphany, and Barrelhouse. She received her MFA from Brooklyn College, where she was a Truman Capote fellow. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and son, where she currently serves as Mayor Mamdani’s Deputy Director of Speechwriting. She is at work on her first novel.
Reading List
Merge in One Thousand Feet
The next week, Leila came prepared. Most of her life, she had failed to find a vein from which conversation flowed with her father. How embarrassing, she kept thinking, that all this time she just had to come up with the right questions to ask.
Posts
Shenandoah Interviews Writer and Political Speechwriter Sarah Gouda
Sarah Gouda is a writer and speechwriter who hails from Ohio. She is currently the Deputy Director of Speechwriting for Zohran Mamdani in the Office for the Mayor for New York City. In the past, she served as the speechwriter to the president at Planned Parenthood Federation of America, and as the Deputy Director of Speechwriting to Vice President Kamala Harris in the Biden-Harris administration. Outside of political speeches, Gouda has written for Teen Vogue, Rookie, Reductress, Gothamist, Splinter, Barrelhouse, Chicago Sun-Times, Epiphany, and Shenandoah. She received an MFA in fiction from Brooklyn College, where she was a Truman Capote fellow. Shenandoah’s special features editor, Nadeen Kharputly, interviewed the writer to discuss how she approaches craft in both her creative writing and in her day-to-day work as a political speechwriter.