Dr. Sarah Jefferis (’14) is an author, editor, writing coach, and CEO of Write.Now. She specializes in helping you commit to the writer within. Sarah holds an MA in Creative Writing and Literature from Hollins University, an MFA in Poetry from Cornell University, and a Ph.D. in Creative Writing from SUNY Binghamton. Her most recent poetry collection, What Enters the Mouth, was published in February 2017 by Standing Stone Books. Ansel Elkins, the author of Blue Yodel, said that “these are fearless poems—a reckoning of the violence of girlhood rendered with grit and clarity.”
Forgetting the Salt, her first book of poetry was published by Foothills Press in 2008. She won the Bea Gonzalez Poetry Prize for her poem “Motherhood.” Additionally, her poems and nonfiction work have appeared in Rhino, The Mississippi Review, The American Literary Review, Stone Canoe, Icon, The Hollins Critic, The Patterson Review, The Healing Muse, The Cimmaron Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, and other journals. Her essay “Blood and Chocolate” appears in the anthology Labor Day: True Birth Stories by Today’s Best Women Writers, published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux in 2014.
Sarah has been both a poetry and fiction fellow at the Squaw Valley Community of Writers in California and held residencies in poetry and creative nonfiction at the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts in New York, and The Studios at Mass MOCA.
She is working on her first novel Running After Jesus, and her third collection of poetry, After Marriage. She is also working on a collection of essays about interracial relationships and eradicating white privilege. She recently served as the Interim Program Director and Academic Advisor for the McNair Program at Cornell’s Office of Academic Diversity Initiatives, which supports first-generation, low-income, underrepresented students of color.
As someone who is first-generation and grew up economically impoverished, and outside of the dream of Higher Education, she understands the immense economic obstacles placed before students who are attempting to acquire a Bachelor’s and or Graduate degrees. She knows how difficulties can stop individuals, but also how they can serve as motivators. Sarah currently writes, edits, and makes a home for two brilliant feminist girls in Burbank, California.