Meet the Author: Sabrina Imbler

2 September 2025

Sabrina Imbler is a writer and science journalist living in Brooklyn. Their first chapbook, Dyke (geology) was published by Black Lawrence Press, and they have received numerous fellowships and scholarships in the US, including from the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and Tin House. They are the recipient of the Evert Clark/Seth Payne Award for young science journalists, and their essays and reporting have appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, Catapult, and Sierra, among other publications.

Sabrina’s book My Life in Sea Creatures is one of our selections for Wild Reads 2025. You can find My Life in Sea Creatures and Sabrina’s other books on the Suffolk Community Libraries catalogue.

What was your first introduction to books and reading? Were you surrounded by books as a child or did you visit a library?

I spent a lot of time in bookstores as a kid. My mom would often drop me off at the bookstore by the grocery store or the mall and pick me up when she was finished running errands, and I got in the habit of reading entire books at the bookstore. They remodeled our local library when I was in high school, and then I started spending a lot more time there.

What was your journey to publication?

I started writing the essays that would become My Life in Sea Creatures for an online magazine called Catapult, which is now defunct. I had a column there (also called My Life in Sea Creatures) and each month I ran a new essay that paired some sea creature with a personal experience or cultural object. Some worked better than others, but it helped me lay the blueprint for imagining those essays as parts of a whole. I was lucky enough to start working with my wonderful agent, Ayesha Pande, soon after I finished the column there, and she helped me sell the book to my amazing editor, Jean Garnett.

A few months after I sold the book, the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and my timeline got a lot delayed—Jean broke her arm and lost childcare, I had to ditch all these plans for travelling to see some of the animals I wanted to write about in person. But I’m happy with the version of the book that ultimately took shape, as I think the longer timeline gave me more space to think things through.

Do you have a writing routine?

I write primarily on the couch with a horrible blue blanket on top of me that my cat, Melon, loves. She wedges herself between my laptop and the couch, and we can sit there for hours. She also likes to sleep on top of my arm as I’m typing, so it can be a little bit of a strength workout as well.

When did you first start to think about taking your interest in the ocean and relating it to your lived experience as a queer, non-binary mixed-race writer?

I have always loved sea creatures, and in college I wrote my thesis around whales. But it wasn’t a very good thesis. I modelled it after a lot of the nature writing I had read, which was primarily by white men and took a kind of bird’s-eye view of the world—assessing it in a putatively objective way and often disappearing the humans whose lives were entangled with the animals they wrote about. Only when I started to give myself permission to think about my own life alongside that of a deep-sea octopus or color-changing cuttlefish did I feel like I had something authentic to write about. Writing the book ended up being a genuinely helpful act of self-reflection, with many revelations I’m not sure I would have come to so quickly without the book.

Can you tell us a little about your experience of writing My Life in Sea Creatures and how you selected the sea creatures that feature in the book?

Right out of college, I had a part-time job writing clickbait about the ocean: How did this seal wind up on a farm? You’ll never guess what dolphin vaginas look like! WATCH: Handicapped goldfish gets new lease on life! This helped me pay the bills when I wanted to club all the time in Manhattan, but it also introduced me to so many sea creatures I’d never heard of. I read so much popular science coverage by writers like Ed Yong, who told the stories of these animals in fresh and respectful ways, and I slowly compiled an archive of them in my mind. To plan out the essays in the book, I made a T chart: sea creatures on one side and personal experiences on the other, and some were as simple as drawing a line between the two.

You seem to be drawn to creatures that are often overlooked. Why do you think this is?

I work as a science and natural history journalist as my day job, and over the years I’ve seen how charismatic animals—meaning the big, the fluffy, the beautiful, the familiar—occupy the spotlight in every sense. They star in tabloid coverage, they get the most conservation funding, people are less likely to poach them or think of them as pests. So I’ve always felt aligned with the smaller, grosser, and more alienating creatures, which have just as much a right to live on this planet and often get short shrift for how strange they seem to us. As a queer person, this is a familiar experience to me.

My Life in Sea Creatures is one of our Wild Reads this year. What would you most like readers to take away from the experience?

I’m so honored that My Life in Sea Creatures was picked to be a Wild Read this year! I hope readers leave with a greater appreciation for the animals we don’t often, or like to, think of: life lurking in deep-sea abysses, faceless gelatinous blobs, and even the humble, misunderstood goldfish. I hope readers can stretch their empathy toward other lives, human and non-human.

What’s next for you?

I’m working on a book about bugs now, which are the overlooked creatures that I have always struggled to find acceptable or redeeming. I wanted to challenge myself to stretch my own empathy, unlearn fear and disgust, and find community in the creatures that I see in my everyday life, which are, unfortunately, not cuttlefish but cockroaches.

One book that you keep returning to or wish you had written?

I absolutely loved Lars Horn’s The Voice of the Fish, which is this gorgeous, crystalline essay about disability, antiquity, mythology, fish, waterbodies, and the trans experience. It was a book that shares many of my interests but explores them in ways I could never have imagined or thought of, and a book in which I felt like I learned a lot as a writer.

If you had the power to change one thing about the world, what would it be?

I wish that people would unite against all that threatens life, meaning against genocides, fossil fuels, colonialism, racial capitalism, transphobia, etc. As Leanne Betasamosake Simpson writes in her new book, Theory of Water, “As the axis of capital, and the states protecting that capital, descend into fascism, the present moment demands that we come together and face our linked crises in a manner that ensures the sanctity of the planet for all species and generations yet to come.”