Sarah Cypher Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Sarah Cypher
Sarah Cypher works with words. She is a freelance book editor and award winning author. She has her MFA from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, where she was a Rona Jaffe Graduate Creative Writing Fellow.

Sarah’s writing appeared in Mizna, The Rumpus, Washington Post, Electric Literature, North American Review, Lit Hub, and New Ohio Review, as well as others.

She traveled to Palestine in order to help her finish writing her novel, however she also found a surprising family connection in the Nabulsi soap making trade.

As a writer, Arab American, military spouse, and queer woman, she’s interested in how people define and identify with each other’s differences.

Starting in 2003, she has experimented with narratives drawn from her Lebanese background and has told them with a fabulist twist. Her hard drives contains multitudes within it.

Sarah grew up with her ankles in the Allegheny, and she returns to the city often in order to see her parents and poke around at Penn Mac and Labad’s. When she’s able to, she just walks, she loves the Highland Park reservoir and the trails located near Freeport. It’s an area with so much history, and some of it feels quite immediate to her. Her dad’s ancestry goes all the way back to the pre-American Revolution era, basically when it was unceded Native American territory and Fort Pitt still had British soldiers and walls. Her mom’s grandpa came from Greater Syria as a carpenter and then brought his whole entire family over during the steel era’s height.

She spent much of her life in Western Pennsylvania before graduating from Carnegie Mellon in 2002, and then she moved to the West Coast. To this day, there may always be at least a dozen pierogies in her freezer and a Terrible Towel somewhere in her car. Never know what she’ll need.

Storytelling was important in her family while she was growing up as a way to remain connected to this place, family, and culture which even her mom’s generation and most of her grandpa’s generation had lost access to. However these connections were still a sort of intergenerational memory of their life in the Old Country and then in America, particularly while their relatives began moving to move away from Pittsburgh for marriage and for work. Storytelling serves a similar function for her Rummani family.

For Betty and her Aunt Nuha, storytelling is also this important site of agency, a way to work through the tensions between self-discovery and tradition. For them, it is the power to be the teller of your own story, to subvert without ever directly contradicting, and to be able to imagine what connects us all.

As she wrote their characters, she was thinking about storytelling as this unique sort of language in the human species, and she drew on the rhythms of traditional Arabic folktales yet played with what it would actually sound like if this structure were asked to carry a much different type of material. The work felt quite personal to her, because it parallels Sarah’s own relationship to writing.

She wound up landing on “The Skin and Its Girl” since it captures something of how our identities are shaped by the bodies we’re born into or buttoned into by our culture, whatever that culture might be. Betty’s own lifetime of responding to or resisting how the world sees her eventually leaves a mark on her as well, and like so many people, she must reckon with an irony that what the world sees makes its way to the inside and blurs the line between external and internal worlds.

This is while struggling with coming up with book titles, as the portion of the novel that made up her MFA thesis lives in the campus library forever as “UNTITLED”.

“The Skin and Its Girl” was a 2024 Shortlistee for the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize in Fiction and was a 2023 Stonewall Honor Book.

“The Skin and Its Girl” is the first stand alone novel and was released in 2023. One queer Palestinian American woman pieces together her great aunt’s secrets in an enchanting debut which confronts questions concerning exile, sexual identity, and lineage.

In a Pacific Northwest hospital located far away from the Rummani family’s ancestral home in Palestine, a stillborn baby’s heart starts beating and her skin turns vibrantly and permanently cobalt blue. That same day, the Rummanis’ centuries old soap factory in Nablus gets destroyed in an air strike. Aunt Nuha, the keeper of their lore and family matriarch, believes that the blue girl is the embodiment of their sacred history, which harkens back to this time when the Rummanis were among the wealthiest soapmakers and their blue soap was the symbol of this legendary love.

Decades later, Betty has returned to Aunt Nuha’s grave, and is faced with a tough choice: should she follow her heart and the woman she loves, perpetuating her family’s cycle of exile, or should she remain in the only country that she has ever known? Betty finds her answer in these partially translated notebooks which reveal her aunt’s complicated life and struggle with her own sexuality, which Nuha hid in order to help the family immigrate to America. However like Betty will soon learn, her aunt hid so much more than that.

“The Skin and Its Girl” is a poetic and searing story about identity and desire, and is a provocative exploration of exactly how we allow stories to define, divide, and unite us, and wield even the power to restore this broken family. Sarah Cypher is a rare debut novelist that writes with the flair and mystery of a more seasoned storyteller.

This novel is just as beautifully detailed as a piece of Palestinian embroidery, and is a vivid and bold novel that will speak to readers across cultures, genders, and identities. She weaves a brilliant story of magic, family, and enduring legacy. It serves as a thrilling ode to storytelling’s power, to a tale’s ability to illuminate and conceal, to destroy and preserve. Betty is a highly memorable and original protagonist that leaps right off of the page and makes a home inside your imagination.