Overview
Sarah Jefferis is the author of What Enters the Mouth (Standing Stone press, 2017) and Forgetting the Salt (Foothills press, 2008). She is currently at work on her third collection of poetry, After Marriage, and a collection of essays on racial violence and love in Virginia. She received her PhD from SUNY Binghamton, her MFA in Poetry from Cornell, and has taught at Ithaca College, Wells, and Binghamton before returning to the English Department. Bruce Smith, author of The Other Lover and Devotions claims that Sarah’s new book, What Enters the Mouth, has “a licked clean, all in, unreasonable, unafraid, incendiary, vulnerable and startling reckoning I admire.” Ansel Elkins, author of Blue Yodel, asserts “this is a brave collection that strides beautifully into a power and wildness of womanhood that refuses to be contained.” She won the Bea Gonzalez poetry prize from Stone Canoe for her poem: “Motherhood.” Her poems and nonfiction have appeared in Rhino, The Mississippi Review, The American Literary Review, Stone Canoe, Icon, The Hollins Critic, The Patterson Review, Icarus, The Healing Muse and other journals. She has been both a poetry fellow and fiction fellow at the Squaw Valley Community of Writers Center in California, the Saltonstall Foundation, and an artist in residence at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. Her research interests include contemporary poetry, diaspora studies, diversity and inclusion in higher education, sexual violence on college campuses, theatre, dance, and modern art.
Research Focus
- contemporary poetry
- diaspora studies
- diversity and inclusion in higher education
- sexual violence on college campuses
- theatre
- dance
- modern art