Sarah Gorham (born March 30, 1954) is an American poet, essayist, and publisher residing in Prospect, Kentucky.
Gorham was educated at the Ecole D'Humanité, an international boarding school in Switzerland and received her MFA from the University of Iowa in 1978 as well as her BA in 1976 from Antioch College. [1]
Gorham is author of four collections of poetry, most recently, Bad Daughter (Four Way Books, 2011). Gorham's poems have been widely published, including in Best American Poetry 2006 [2] and The Nation. [3] A memoir, "Alpine Apprentice" (University of Georgia Press, 2017) is a meditation on her time at an international boarding school in the Swiss Alps.
In 1994, Sarah Gorham co-founded Sarabande Books, Inc. with her husband, the poet and playwright Jeffrey Skinner. Sarabande Books, [4] is an independent, nonprofit, literary press devoted to the publication of poetry, short fiction, and literary nonfiction located in Louisville, Kentucky. Gorham serves as President and Editor-in-Chief. In 2013, Sarabande Books, Inc. was awarded the inaugural Association of Writers and Writing Programs Small Press Publishers Award, [5] for excellence as a nonprofit literary publisher.
The Journal magazine, noted that Gorham's poetry "investigates the difficult, often unsettling nature of family dynamics without self-pity and without pointing fingers" [6] and Publishers Weekly wrote that her work "can also inhabit a dream space that only the bond between a parent and child makes visible". [7]
Gorham and Jeffrey Skinner were the 2002 writers-in-residence at the James Merrill House in Stonington, CT. [8] Gorham has also received grants and fellowships from The Kentucky State Arts Council, The Kentucky Foundation for Women, The Delaware State Arts Council, The Connecticut Commission on the Arts, Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.
Gorham was awarded a 2013 NEA fellowship in creative writing. [9]
Her collection A Study in Perfect won the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Award for Creative Nonfiction in 2013, awarded by Bernard Cooper.
Jeffrey Skinner is an American poet, writer, playwright, and emeritus professor in the Department of English at the University of Louisville.
Lorri Neilsen Glenn is a Canadian poet, ethnographer, and essayist. Born and raised on the Prairies, she moved to Nova Scotia in 1983. Neilsen Glenn is the author and editor of several books of creative nonfiction, poetry, literacy, ethnography, and essays. Her award-winning writing focuses on women, arts-based research, and memoir/life stories; her work is known for its hybrid and lyrical approaches. She has published book reviews in national and international journals and newspapers.
Lia Purpura is an American poet, writer and educator. She is the author of four collections of poems, four collections of essays and one collection of translations. Her poems and essays appear in AGNI, The Antioch Review, DoubleTake, FIELD, The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, Orion Magazine, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Parnassus: Poetry in Review, Ploughshares. Southern Review, and many other magazines.
Mark F. Jarman is an American poet and critic often identified with the New Narrative branch of the New Formalism; he was co-editor with Robert McDowell of The Reaper throughout the 1980s. Centennial Professor of English, Emeritus, at Vanderbilt University, he is the author of eleven books of poetry, three books of essays, and a book of essays co-authored with Robert McDowell. He co-edited the anthology Rebel Angels: 25 Poets of the New Formalism with David Mason.
Alyce Miller is an American writer who currently lives in the DC Metro area.
Sallie Bingham is an American author, playwright, poet, teacher, feminist activist, and philanthropist. She is the eldest daughter of Barry Bingham, Sr., patriarch of the Bingham family of Louisville, Kentucky.
John Fenton Johnson is an American writer and professor of English and LGBT Studies at the University of Arizona.
Maggie Nelson is an American writer. She has been described as a genre-busting writer defying classification, working in autobiography, art criticism, theory, feminism, queerness, sexual violence, the history of the avant-garde, aesthetic theory, philosophy, scholarship, and poetry. Nelson has been the recipient of a 2016 MacArthur Fellowship, a 2012 Creative Capital Literature Fellowship, a 2011 NEA Fellowship in Poetry, and a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship in Nonfiction. Other honors include the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism and a 2007 Andy Warhol Foundation/Creative Capital Arts Writers Grant.
David Mura is an American author, poet, novelist, playwright, critic and performance artist whose writings explore the themes of race, identity and history. In 2018, Mura has published a book on creative writing, A Stranger’s Journey: Race, Identity & Narrative Craft in Writing, in which he argues for a more inclusive and expansive definition of craft.
Jeanne Larsen is a poet, novelist, translator, and essayist. Much of her work shows the growing influence of Buddhist perspectives on U.S. literature. This includes not only the poetry and creative nonfiction, but also the novels in her Avalokiteśvara trilogy: Silk Road, Bronze Mirror, and Manchu Palaces.
Four Way Books is an American nonprofit literary press located in New York City, which publishes poetry and short fiction by emerging and established writers. It features the work of the winners of national poetry competitions, as well as collections accepted through general submission, panel selection, and solicitation by the editors. The press is run by director and founding editor Martha Rhodes, who is the author of five poetry collections. Four Way Books titles are distributed by University of Chicago Press. The press has received grants from New York State Council on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and The Council of Literary Magazines and Presses through their re-grant program.
Sarabande Books is an American not-for-profit literary press founded in 1994. It is headquartered in Louisville, Kentucky, with an office in New York City. Sarabande publishes contemporary poetry and nonfiction. Sarabande is a literary press whose books have earned reviews in the New York Times.
Karen An-hwei Lee is an American poet.
Goldie Goldbloom is an Australian Hasidic novelist, essayist and short story writer. She is an LGBT activist and a former board member of Eshel.
Simone Muench is an American poet and a professor of creative writing and film studies. She was raised in the small town of Benson, Louisiana and also Arkansas. She completed her bachelor's and master's degrees at the University of Colorado in Boulder, received her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Chicago and is director of the Writing Program at Lewis University in Romeoville.
Karen Salyer McElmurray is an American writer of creative nonfiction and literary fiction. Her works include Wanting Radiance, The Motel of the Stars: A Novel, Surrendered Child: A Birth Mother’s Journey, and Strange Birds in the Tree of Heaven, as well as numerous essays and short stories. McElmurray was Editor’s Pick by Oxford American in November 2009. She was the recipient of the AWP Award for Creative Nonfiction (2003), and the Lillie Chaffin Award for Appalachian Writing (2001).
Martha Modena Vertreace-Doody is an American poet, and author of short stories and articles on literature and teaching. She is currently Distinguished Professor of English and Poet-in-Residence at Kennedy-King College in Chicago.
Elena Passarello is an American writer, actor, and professor. In 2018, she became the announcer for the PRI variety show and podcast Live Wire with Luke Burbank.
Sarah Blake is an American writer from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her debut novel, Naamah, is a retelling of the Great Flood and the family's time on the ark. Her poetry books include Mr. West and Let's Not Live on Earth, as well as the chapbook Named After Death. She received a Literature Fellowship from the NEA in 2013.
Jenny Johnson is an American queer poet.