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.

This is the third conversation in our series, Catalysts, that profiles people whose craft—defined broadly—advances justice and equality. This is an excerpt of the full conversation, which will be published in our Fall 2026 issue in December.

Nadeen Kharputly: What's it like to write for Zohran Mamdani’s voice, and in his voice, as opposed to the way that you've had to hone your own voice in your own creative writing projects. What's it like to adopt his voice for his communications, [relative or] contrary to all the things that you've been taught about voice and creative writing?

Sarah Gouda: This is a larger issue with speechwriting and not specific to him, but when you're writing for the ear and not the page, you kind of have to embrace some “bad” writing. It would feel stiff and overly formal, or just not true to how someone kind of speaks with ellipses, if you write the most concise sentence possible at all times. Which I find frustrating, because I worry that I'm picking up bad habits in my writing sometimes.

And also his voice is changing. That's what's really exciting about working for him right now. You know the famous phrase, “you campaign in poetry and govern in prose?” That's very true. It's not enough to paint a vision of what universal childcare would look like in New York City, how great it would be. You also have to get into the nuts-and-bolts of how you are delivering it.

His voice is so different from mine. He can turn something that I might be like, oh, this isn't how I would say it, or I would much prefer to take a different register, [but] once it comes out of his mouth, it connects with people, it resonates, and it's authentic to him. That goes for anyone you write speeches for that is good.

NK: In your story [published in our Spring 2026 issue], “Merge in One Thousand Feet,” the main character hasn’t been back to Egypt since she was thirteen, and she wants to go so badly, but then she's foiled by the pandemic. Could you tell me about some of the forces that inspired this story, and this deep longing to want to visit Egypt?

SG: I was born in the States, both my parents are Egyptian—Alexandrians—though, similar to the story, they've both been married before, and I have a half-sister who is half-white, half-Egyptian. I have always had a kind of fraught relationship with my Egyptian-ness, mostly owing to the fact that I speak very clunky, poor Arabic, and feel very insecure around that fact. My parents, for reasons I still don't fully understand—because I feel like most Arab families I know teach their kids and speak to them in Arabic—my parents spoke to me in English. I think they wanted us to assimilate, and we did, but there's a grief with that. I spent a great chunk of my late teenage years and early twenties being furious at my parents that they never taught me proper Arabic, and kind of making peace with that, and seeking to learn it myself on my own terms as an adult. But I've tried to learn on my own, it is so painful to realize just how much I don't know. I’m newly wounded by the fact that I didn't get this when I was young, and it's very humbling to forget these words or stumble in conversation in a way that I feel like my “right” as an Egyptian should have just given me.

So I found it easier to explain that through a biracial character, but that grief is very much a real thing for me. Because I grew up so assimilated and so American and kind of obsessed with passing and being accepted by the white community that I grew up in, I think I spent a lot of my childhood passively absorbing Egyptian culture. My mom would relay news of my cousins and relatives in Egypt to me, but I wasn't on the phone with them. Now as an adult, especially as a mother, I very much want to maintain those connections as my parents age, as I start to think about myself getting older, and not being able to passively rely on them for that connection to their home. So that was the inspiration of this story.

NK: I'm thinking of Shenandoah's readers and what they're most likely to be attuned to in terms of the functions of storytelling and narrative in creative writing, but how do you rely on storytelling and narrative as a speechwriter? Is there something that you've learned as a speechwriter about [those things] that a creative writer might learn from?

SG: Yeah, that's a great question, because I think it's so different. As you've read in my story, I have a “voiciness” and a kind of self-deprecating humor that doesn't really work in government speech [laughs], even though that is my impulse, and so, it's taught me a lot about concision and obviousness. This is true in fiction and in speechwriting. I think a lot of fiction writers that I know deal with this, where when you're writing something, you think, it's so obvious. What's gonna happen next is so obvious to everyone, it's cliché and trite, and you need to make it more subtle and submerge it in shadowy looks between two characters or something. Speechwriting has allowed me to be very on the nose about things, because you don't really have time to get into all that, and you have to set up a punchline or a reveal, and you're playing with archetypal stories. It's given me the confidence to not overthink the kind of stories that we’re all, as humans, set up to like: a story of someone overcoming the odds, or an unexpected connection between two unlikely people.

Speechwriting is corny. It is just cornier than fiction writing [laughs], and so I wouldn't want too much of it to come into my craft and fiction, but it's kind of fun to lean into it, to feel liberated to tell the corniest version of a story. I've been in the room when I've tried to really truss [a speech] up in good writing, and in subtlety, and it doesn't hit the same way. The audience wants to feel things, and they want to understand what is happening. So, simplicity and straightforwardness are the best.

This interview, and this excerpt in particular, have been edited for length and clarity.