Jared Yates Sexton


Jared Yates Sexton is an American author and political commentator from Linton, Indiana. He is an associate professor in the Department of Writing and Linguistics at Georgia Southern University.

Early life

Sexton grew up in southern Indiana. He studied English and Creative Writing at Indiana State University, and later received his MFA in Creative Writing from Southern Illinois University in 2008.

Career

Sexton taught Creative Writing at Ball State before accepting a position at Georgia Southern University, where he is a tenured Associate Professor of Creative Writing.
Sexton is the author of three short story collections: An End to All Things, The Hook and the Haymaker, and I Am the Oil of the Engine of the World, as well as a crime novel, Bring me the Head of Yorkie Goodman, written under the pseudonym Rowdy Yates.
His work has been published in The New York Times, The New Republic, Salon, Paste, Southern Humanities Review, PANK, and in Hobart.

Political journalism

In April 2015, Sexton started covering the 2016 U.S. presidential election, attending multiple rallies for both candidates and writing regular articles for Atticus Review in his column Atticus on the Trail. He covered the Charleston shooting and trail of church burnings in the South. In the summer of 2016, Sexton went to another Trump rally in South Carolina, and reported on the behavior he observed there. His live tweets of the event soon went viral and garnered him national attention, which included frequent death threats. He later wrote about the experience and became a regular contributor to The New Republic and The New York Times.
In December 2016, Sexton was a guest political commentator on The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell on MSNBC, as well as on various radio programs, including KCRW.
In 2017, Sexton gained Internet fame when he tweeted "I...worked on this story for a year...and...he just...tweeted it out." The tweet was in reference to Donald Trump Jr. disclosing email correspondence between the Trump campaign and Russia.

Selected works

Books