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Sarah Miriam Schulman (born July 28, 1958) is an American novelist, playwright, nonfiction writer, screenwriter, LGBT rights, and AIDS historian. She holds an endowed chair in nonfiction at Northwestern University and is a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities. She is a recipient of the Bill Whitehead Award and the Lambda Literary Award.
Schulman's third novel, After Delores, received a positive review in The New York Times, was translated into eight languages, and was awarded an American Library Association Stonewall Book Award in 1989. People In Trouble appeared in 1990, Empathy appeared in 1992. The novelist Edmund White reviewed her next novel, Rat Bohemia (1995), for the New York Times, and it was named one of the 100 best LGBT books by The Publishing Triangle.
Subsequent novels include Shimmer (1998), The Child (2007), and The Mere Future (2009). The Cosmopolitans (2016) was named one of the best American novels of 2016 by Publishers Weekly. In 2018, she published Maggie Terry, a return to and comment on the lesbian detective novel, addressing the emotions of life under President Donald Trump.
(1998), which won the Stonewall Book Award, argues that significant plot elements of the successful 1996 musical Rent were lifted from her 1990 novel, People in Trouble. The heterosexual plot of Rent is based on the opera La Bohème, while the gay plot is similar to Schulman's novel.. Schulman never sued, but analyzed in Stagestruck the way the musical depicted AIDS and gay people, in contrast to work made by those communities that same year.
In 2009, The New Press published Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences, (2025). 9781595584809, The New Press. ISBN 9781595584809 which was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award. In September 2013, , was published by the University of California Press. Slate called The Gentrification of the Mind one of the 10 "Best Most Unknown Books" and GalleyCat called it one of the "Best Unrecognized Books" of the year. It was also nominated for a Lambda Literary Award. Israel/Palestine and the Queer International was published by Duke University Press in 2012, and was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award. Her 2016 book Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility and the Duty of Repair, published by Arsenal Pulp Press, was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award and won a Judy Grahn Award by the Publishing Triangle.
In 2016, Schulman was named one of Publishers Weeklys 60 Most Underrated Writers.
In 2018, the second edition of her 1994 collection was issued including new material by Urvashi Vaid, Stephen Thrasher, and Alison Bechdel.
Let the Record Show: A Political History of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power New York (ACT UP, New York 1987–1993) was published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux in 2021, and was a finalist for both the 2019 and 2020 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize for Works-In-Progress and for the 2022 PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction. It won a special award from the Publishing Triangle, won the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction, and was awarded a prize by the National Organization of LGBT Journalists. It was a New York Times Notable Book of 2021. Cleveland Review of Books said it combines "acute political and social analysis with in-depth portraits of human beings."
Her nonfiction book The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity was published by Penguin Random House's Thesis Books in April 2025.
In 1987, Schulman and filmmaker Jim Hubbard co-founded the New York Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film Festival, now called MIX NYC.
In 1992, Schulman and five other women co-founded the Lesbian Avengers, a direct action organization. On her 1992 book tour for Empathy, Schulman visited gay bookstores in the South to start chapters. The organization's high points included founding the first Dyke March during the March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation, and sending groups of young organizers to Maine and Idaho to assist local fights against anti-gay ballot initiatives.
Since 2001, Schulman and Jim Hubbard have been creating the ACT UP Oral History Project, interviewing 188 surviving members of ACT UP over 18 years. They produced a feature documentary, , which premiered at the Museum of Modern Art in the fall of 2010. Harvard purchased the archive for their collection, while maintaining free access, and the funds were used to produce United in Anger.
In 2009, Schulman declined an invitation to Tel Aviv University in support of Palestine and the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions. She is on the advisory board of Jewish Voice for Peace and is faculty advisor to Students for Justice in Palestine at the College of Staten Island. She is also on the board of RAIA (Researching the American/Israeli Alliance). In 2011, she published an op-ed in the New York Times on pinkwashing, a term coined earlier by Ali Abunimah to describe how the Israeli government uses LGBT rights in its public relations. Since 2010 she has served on the Advisory Board of Jewish Voice for Peace. She supports a boycott of Israeli cultural institutions, including publishers and literary festivals. She was an original signatory of the manifesto "Refusing Complicity in Israel's Literary Institutions".
While employed as a university professor, Schulman continued to teach and mentor writers through a number of community-based initiatives including the Lambda Literary Foundation, Queer Artists Mentorship, an independent workshop for trans women writers sponsored by Topside Press, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and a number of workshops run out of her apartment before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. She curates First Mondays: Free Readings of New Works In Progress, at Performance Space New York, held on the first Monday of each month.
In 2017, she joined the advisory board of Claudia Rankine's Racial Imaginary Institute.
Schulman secured the rights to write an adaptation of Isaac Bashevis Singer's Enemies, A Love Story, which premiered at the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia in 2007, directed by Jiri Ziska starring Morgan Spector. It later had a New York reading at the New York Theatre Workshop, directed by Jo Bonney.
In 2018, her play Between Covers was included in the New Stages Festival at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, her play Roe Versus Wade had a reading at the New York Theatre Workshop and she was commissioned by BMG and the Manchester Factory to write the book for The Snow Queen, a theatrical work highlighting the music of Marianne Faithfull.
In 2021, her play The Lady Hamlet premiered at the Provincetown Theater, starring Jennifer Van Dyck, and won the Best New Play award from Broadway World/Boston.
In May 2023, the musical adaptation of her 1998 novel Shimmer had its first workshop at Yale, with music by composer Anthony Davis, lyrics by Michael Korie, directed by Jess McLeod. A second workshop took place in January 2024 at Northwestern University.
She is co-producer with Jim Hubbard of his feature-length documentary which premiered at the Museum of Modern Art on the opening night of Documentary Fortnight on February 16, 2012. The film's international premiere was in Ramallah, Palestine. It won Best Documentary at both MIX Milan and ReelQ in Pittsburgh.
Schulman played filmmaker Shirley Clarke to Jack Waters' Jason Holliday in Stephen Winter's response to Clarke's 1967 documentary Portrait of Jason, entitled Jason and Shirley, which premiered at BAMcinemaFest in June 2015 and played for a week at the Museum of Modern Art in October 2015.
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