ABOUT THE AUTHOR
I’m the author of the New York Times bestselling narrative history The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power (Harper, 2008), co-author with Peter Manseau of the experimental travelogue Killing the Buddha: A Heretic’s Bible (Free Press, 2004) and co-editor of Believer, Beware: First-Person Dispatches from the Margins of Faith (Beacon, 2009). I recently completed a collection of essays to be published by W.W. Norton titled What They Wanted, and I’m working on a short book about love, guns, and democracy to be published by Little, Brown, and an even shorter book about sex, violence, and a folk song to be published by Basic Books. Yes, that’s six different publishers; and I love them all.
I began writing in 1990 as a student of Michael Lesy at Hampshire College and continued at a West Coast alt weekly, the San Diego Reader, where I spent my days searching for drama in the back of a Naval courtroom and my nights learning San Diego street life from junkies. Back in New York I interned at The Nation for the late, great cultural journalist Andy Kopkind and worked as an arts editor for a free paper in that doubled as insulation for the homeless.
These days I’m a contributing editor for Harper’s and Rolling Stone, and a visiting research scholar at New York University’s Center for Religion and Media, where I’ve taught literary journalism and American religious history. At NYU, working with Kathryn Joyce and Jay Rosen, I created the media criticism site TheRevealer.org with a grant from the Pew Charitable Trust. It’s now in the hands of Ann Neumann and Nicole Greenfield.
In 2000, Peter Manseau, Jeremy Brothers, and I cofounded an online literary magazine, KillingTheBuddha.com, winner of an Utne/Alternative Press Award, which in 2004 led to a book coauthored with Manseau, Killing the Buddha: A Heretic’s Bible (Free Press), a travelogue based on a year Sharlet and Manseau spent exploring the margins of faith — a cowboy church in Texas, a military pagan coven in Kansas, a Pentecostal exorcism in North Carolina. The book was celebrated on NPR’s Morning Edition as “a mix of hymn and history, poem and prophecy, story and sermon.”
In addition to Harper’s and Rolling Stone, I’ve written for Mother Jones, New York, The Nation, New Statesman, The Washington Post, The Dallas Morning News, Nerve, Salon, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Columbia Journalism Review, Oxford American, The Baffler, Lapham’s Quarterly, The Forward, and Pakn Treger, an award-winning magazine of Jewish history literature I created for the National Yiddish Book Center. This past year I’ve been a semi-regular guest on MSNBC’s “Rachel Maddow Show”; I’ve also made appearances on or in Comedy Central’s “Daily Show,” HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher,” “Hardball,” CNN, NPR, BBC, CBC, Air America, Radio France, The New York Times, Newsweek, and other media venues. My 2005 Harper’s cover story “Soldiers of Christ” was part of Harper’s winning National Magazine Award entry, and a 2003 Harper’s cover story, “Big World,” was anthologized in Best Music Writing 2004. A 2007 feature for Oxford American, “The People’s Singer,” was anthologized in the 2008 edition of Best Music Writing. I live in New England with my wife and daughter.
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