Marina
Keegan
“Let’s make something happen to this world.”
If you are between 15 -25 and ready to “make a difference to this world,” you are invited to apply for…
The 2026 Opposite of Loneliness Fellowship
Accepting applications until July 25, 2026.
The Anniversary Edition
Available Now
The Anniversary Edition Available Now
Announcing the Anniversary Edition of The Opposite of Loneliness
People often ask if there is any more of Marina’s work available to read? The answer is yes!
This May, Scribner will publish a new edition of the beloved book by Marina Keegan, featuring a foreword from bestselling author R.F. Kuang and additional materials, including one of Marina’s final essays and a selection from her performance poetry.
It has been more than a decade since the initial release of the award-winning posthumous collection of essays and short stories, Marina Keegan’s The Opposite of Loneliness, that took the world by storm. Marina Keegan’s star was on the rise when she graduated magna cum laude from Yale in May 2012. She had a play ready to be produced at the New York Fringe Festival and a job waiting for her at The New Yorker. Tragically, five days after graduation, Marina died in a car accident.
As her family, friends, and classmates, deep in grief, joined to create a memorial service for Marina, her unforgettable last essay for the Yale Daily News, “The Opposite of Loneliness,” went viral, receiving more than 1.4 million hits. She had struck a chord.
“Sparks of light in the darkness is the only way to describe the experience of hearing from people all over the world in the days after my daughter Marina’s death. Our grieving family was overwhelmed by an outpouring from readers telling us about the impact of her words on their lives. Remarkably, these testimonials have not stopped coming our way. It is abundantly clear that Marina’s spirit continues to resonate out into the universe and into our hearts.”-- Tracy, Marina’s Mother
Originally published in 2014, this poignant collection of Keegan’s writings continues to resonate with readers of all ages around the world. Thousands of readers have responded to her work on social media. Even though she was just twenty-two when she died, Marina left behind a rich, deeply expansive trove of prose that, like her title essay, captures the hope, uncertainty, and possibility of her generation. The Opposite of Loneliness is an assemblage of Marina’s essays and stories that articulate the universal struggle that all of us face as we figure out what we aspire to be and how we can harness our talents to make an impact on the world. Marina’s words have the power to awaken a sense of hope and possibility in readers—a gift that feels more vital than ever in the face of a global epidemic of loneliness.
Announcing the Winner of the 2025
Opposite of Loneliness Fellowship
Ethan Chiu, the Human Circuit.
Hi, I’m Ethan, a last semester senior at Yale, and I’m incredibly honored to be the inaugural Opposite of Loneliness fellowship recipient. I keep coming back to Marina Keegan’s line, “The opposite of loneliness is this feeling that there are people, an abundance of people who are all in this together, who are on your team.” She describes Yale as a web in tiny circles that make you feel loved and safe and she’s scared of losing that when she leaves. As I enter my last semester this fellowship is a chance to take that web beyond Yale to build it around people who power our digital worlds, but often don’t feel on anyone’s team. That’s why my project is called the Human Circuit. We hear semiconductors and they thing phones, AI, and geopolitics but behind every chip are real people, migrant works, subcontracted workers, and the folks who clean, test, package, and keep production moving. That’s why I’m doing field work in Taiwan and the Philippines to record anonymized oral histories with, of course, consent and strong safety protection so that workers who are usually invisible can be seen and heard without being put at risk. And I’ll turn those stories into action using three things. First, an open access toolkit with practical resources for organizing safe reporting and advocacy. Two, virtual policy round tables bringing together workers, advocates, policy makers and industry together to make real change. And third, a public archive of deidentified worker testimonies. And at it’s core this is all about dignity. Because workplaces can be isolating especially when you’re a migrant or subcontract workers. But the opposite of loneliness is being seen, protected, and connected to real leverage. Marina ends by saying “We’re in this together, Let’s make something happen to this world!” That’s exactly the energy I want to carry into this world.