Destry Maria Sibley is a literary scholar, oral historian, and media producer. She currently holds an appointment as the Visiting Research Scholar in the Committee on Globalization and Social Change at The Graduate Center (CUNY). Across disciplines, Destry’s work is broadly concerned with contemporary narratives of the domestic and social: the forms of human relationality that organize social life and the stories we tell about them.
Situated at the intersection of race, gender, and narrative studies, Destry’s scholarship traces the centrality of ideologies of social relation to the construction of American national identity. Her current book project retheorizes the gendered categories of the child, the mother, and the family towards liberatory ends. Her doctoral dissertation received the Alumni and Doctoral Faculty Prize for the Most Distinguished Dissertation of the Year from the English Department at the Graduate Center (CUNY) and the Carolyn G. Heilbrun Dissertation Prize for an outstanding dissertation from The Center for the Study of Women and Society.
Destry’s second book is a project of archival recovery and literary oral history that retells the history of the postcolonial mid-20th century from the perspective of migrant children. Built on research that Destry conducted as a Fulbright-National Geographic Digital Storytelling Fellow, the narrative follows the lives of three child refugees of the Spanish Civil War, including Destry’s maternal grandmother, through multiple migrations across the Americas. An excerpt of the story was featured on The New Yorker Radio Hour in 2021 after Destry won WNYC’s national podcast accelerator competition. In 2023, her manuscript received the PEN/Jean Stein Grant for Literary Oral History from PEN America.
Destry has been the recipient of fellowships from Mellon/ACLS, the American Association of University Women, Humanities New York, and the Women Writing Women’s Lives Seminar. She has taught in the English Departments of Lehman College and The City College of New York, where she received the Humanities Teaching Award from the Rifkind Center for the Humanities and Arts. Previously, Destry served as an Education Fellow at the New York Public Library.
In addition to writing and teaching, Destry has a decade of experience as a digital media producer for networks that include WNYC Studios, Magnificent Noise, TED, Panoply, and the Google News Lab. She currently produces Esther Perel’s award-winning podcast Where Should We Begin?
Destry holds a PhD in English from the Graduate Center (CUNY), where she was a Provost Enhancement Fellow.
She is represented by Dara Kaye of WME Books.
Get in touch at destry.sibley@gmail.com.