Deirdre Sugiuchi is finishing her white evangelical captivity narrative, Unreformed, which takes place at a Christian nationalist reform school in the Dominican Republic. She also is working on a project called Two Mississippi. Her work has been featured in Electric Literature, Guernica, the Rumpus, Salon, and other places. Sugiuchi has been awarded residencies at the Albee Foundation, the Hambidge Center, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Wildacres. She is a recipient of the Key West Writers Seminar Teacher and Librarian Award, the Mark Austin Segura Award for Nonfiction, and of a 2023 Deming Award for feminist nonfiction. Sugiuchi is a Contributing Writer at Electric Literature, an Assistant Editor at The Rumpus, a co-founder of Athens, Georgia’s New Town Revue music and literature series, and until recently served as a public school librarian. Find her on Instagram and Substack.


Recent Posts

Sarah Stankorb’s Disobedient Women Is a Must-Read Expose About Evangelical Abuse

When I was five years old, my father became a born-again Christian. It’s not a time I like to remember, because my father embraced a form of evangelicalism which taught that men were ordained by God to be head of the household and that women were inferior. Like many evangelical women, I was taught not…

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Recent Posts

My Former Reform School Is In the News Again

Last month Jesus Land author Julia Scheeres, forwarded me a link from ProPublica with a headline that made of us both infuriated. There Were Warning Signs Of Sexual Abuse At a Youth Center. Indiana Kept Sending Boys and Money Anyway. No one wants teenagers to be abused, especially at state-funded Christian facilities, but it was beyond maddening…

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Recent Posts

A User’s Guide to Unreformed/ Moving to Substack

Thank you to everyone who read my Unreformed blog. I’m starting a substack which will occasionally focus on the troubled teen industry but also will include outtakes from my interviews (the next three are Darrin Bell, Emi Nietfield, and Myriam Gurba), what I’m reading, and what I’m researching— I’m currently working on a project exploring…

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Recent Posts

Fahrenheit 2023: Even in Mississippi’s segregation academies, we learned about Emmett Till

I wrote about learning about Emmett Till in my Mississippi Delta segregationist academy, book banning, recent attacks on Black history, and learning the truth over at Salon. Big thanks to David Mura for encouraging me to write this, to Pen America for their coverage of book banning, to Kiese Laymon and Jesmyn Ward for writing…

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Recent Posts

Conversion Therapy Is Abuse…or Why Discourse Surrounding Care for Trans Kids Matters

Yesterday the author Alexander Chee and nearly 200 other writers signed an open letter to the NYTimes addressing their concerns about how the Times covers trans issues, particularly in regards to discourse debating the propriety of medical care for trans children. The full text of the letter is linked here…but a key point is that…

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Recent Posts

RUN TOWARDS THE DANGER

I’ve been reading Sarah Polley’s RUN TOWARDS THE DANGER. The title essay feels like it was written for people, who, like me, have experienced a traumatic injury. IN RUN TOWARDS THE DANGER, Polley, who is Canadian, travels to America to consult with a doctor about a concussion which has lingered for four years. He tells…

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Recent Posts

2022 Interviews

I always knew I wanted to be a writer, but after I was sent to reform school, I didn’t write for a decade. I have a tricky relationship with writing— at the school I was punished for what I wrote in my letters home. They would make me rewrite my letters over and over. I…

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Videos

Talk Beliefs Interview with Sugiuchi

Mark Torrender of the Talk Beliefs Series interviews Deirdre Sugiuchi about her time at Escuela Caribe and Christian cults.

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