Sarah Fuss Kessler is a freelance writer, editor, and journalist based in Los Angeles. Her reporting and creative writing have appeared in such publications as Los Angeles magazine, Tablet, the Forward, Pacific Standard, Shondaland, and Los Angeles Review of Books, where she's served as a nonfiction editor. A long-form investigation she wrote about a high school #MeToo uprising in the San Joaquin Valley appeared in Medium's current events publication, GEN, was a Longreads editors' pick, and became an episode of NPR's Latino USA. Her business clients have included the Milken Institute and the American Psychoanalytic Association. She has a long-form reported personal essay forthcoming in VQR in Summer 2023.

 

Formerly, Sarah was the senior editor of special projects at TakePart.com, a news startup owned by Participant Media, known for films such as Spotlight, Food, Inc., and An Inconvenient Truth. She restructured TakePart's education, food, and wildlife sections, which entailed recruiting, managing, and editing nationally recognized experts and emerging journalists. A column she developed there now runs in the New York Times. At Participant Media, she also served as executive editor and producer of a joint website with MSN (MSN Causes) about international social and environmental justice.

 

During four years at Yahoo!, Sarah became the senior food editor, wrote the Fresh Picks blog, and oversaw food content strategy with writers and partners, such as Mark Bittman, Serious Eats, Food & Wine, and Bon Appé​tit. Her stories and those she edited ran regularly on Yahoo's front page. Her publishing career began with an internship at Talk magazine, assignments for weekly papers in Columbus, OH, and an associate editor position at the city magazine WhereLA.

 

In a prior life, Sarah was a field organizer in Tempe, AZ and Albuquerque, NM for John Kerry's presidential campaign. She later managed partnerships at California's Courage Campaign. As a co-founder of Young Progressive Majority, a nonprofit that hosted innovative voter engagement events with local elected leaders, she also oversaw the group's communications and developed its conversational, humorous voice.

 

Sarah earned her MFA in creative writing from the Bennington Writing Seminars and her BA in English from Cornell University. One time Forbes interviewed her about L.A.'s secret treasures, which she curated in her newsletter at the time, One Thing L.A.