Sarah Van Arsdale

Sarah Van Arsdale’s seventh book, a poem exploring the human effect on the coral reef in Mexico, illustrated with her watercolors, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. She is the award-winning author of four books of fiction and two books of poetry; her most recently, a poetry collection titled Taken, braids her personal experience with our current political landscape; it was published in 2021 by Finishing Line Press.  

Her fourth book of fiction, a collection of novellas titled In Case of Emergency, Break Glass, was published by Queens Ferry Press in 2016. Her third novel, Grand Isle, was published by SUNY Press in 2012. Her second, Blue, winner of the 2002 Peter Taylor Prize for the Novel, was published by the University of Tennessee Press in 2003, and her first, Toward Amnesia, was published in 1996 by Riverhead Books. Her poetry, fiction, and essays have been published in literary magazines including Guernica, Passages North, The New Guard, and Bayou; her essays on craft have appeared in The AWP Writers’ Chronicle, and The Writer. 

She holds an MFA in Poetry from Vermont College. In addition to teaching in the Antioch/LA low-residency MFA program, she has taught with Art Workshop International in Assisi, Italy, at New York University, with Bar Ilan University in Tel Aviv, and she is on the faculty of Writers Harbor/Maine Media in Rockport, Maine. For seven years, she curated BLOOM, a reading series in New York City, and serves on the board of the Ferro-Grumley Award in LGBTQ Fiction.  She also works as a private manuscript coach. More of her drawings, short films, and writing can be seen at sarahvanarsdale.com.