About the Instructor:
Sarah Elizabeth Schantz was born in Boulder, Colorado on a full moon in June of 1976, and was raised in a bookstore until she left home at fifteen to explore the United States; she hitch-hiked and hopped freight trains around the country, doing migrant work when she could, living on the streets or in urban camps, and also squatting abandoned (or rather, once-abandoned) houses and buildings. In 1998 she ended up in rural Tennessee where she fell in love with the person who would become her husband. She gave birth to her biological daughter Story in 2000 but had already become a mother to her bonus daughter, Kaya.
In 2002, she returned to Colorado to be close to her parents, and to raise her daughters in the area. Since then she completed a BA in Writing & Literature and an MFA in Writing & Poetics but managed to never graduate from high school or get a GED.
A two-time Pushcart nominee, Sarah has won several literary awards, and her short stories and essays have been widely published in journals and/or anthologies that include, but are not limited to Midwestern Gothic, Hunger Mountain, Third Coast, The Los Angeles Review, and Modern Grimmoire. In 2015, her debut novel Fig came out from Simon & Schuster and was declared A Best of the Year by NPR before winning a 2016 Colorado Book Award; she won the 2016/2017 Boulder County Campus Master Teacher Award at Front Range Community College and was then nominated by the president of the college as Master Adjunct of all Front Range Community College campuses (including online). She also teaches creative writing at Lighthouse Writers Workshop where she was the recipient of the 2022 Beacon Award for Excellence in Teaching (as of 2024, she is now one of the mentors for The Book Project). She is an adjunct professor at Naropa University and teaches here and there for different organizations and for different reasons; if you are interested in hiring her to come teach for you, please use the Contact page available on this website or email writesofpassage13@gmail.com. She is currently working on two novels and a short story collection. Her most recent publications include two pieces of short fiction ("Geraniums for Autumn" was a finalist for a Writer's Digest award before it found a home at Gulf Stream Magazine and "Thank You For Coming" appeared in About Place after being shortlisted for a contest hosted by F(r)iction).
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One of the reasons (W)rites of Passage places so much emphasis on scholarships is because Sarah has firsthand known the violence that is poverty and understands the challenges low-income writers encounter; she would not be where she is now without the financial assistance she has received. Drawing from her own experiences as a runaway, high school dropout, and non-traditional student, Sarah works hard to meet students where they are and to keep them in the classroom if that is where they want to be. Just as she pulls from her experiences to write the human condition, she does so to better understand the writers she works with. While she lacks an Ivy League education, she's squatted West Philly in the 1990s, piled sugar beets in Southern Minnesota, and graded tobacco in the Appalachia. She might not have a PhD, but she figured out how to raise two kids in Boulder County with an annual income of less than $30,000 a year. She's worked as a housecleaner, a nanny, and a janitor. She knows chronic pain and she knows grief. She wrote her first book while she was caring for her mother at home who was dying from pancreatic cancer and since then, in addition to losing several friends, her oldest daughter died unexpectedly in 2018 followed by her father from a Grade 4 glioblastoma in 2023. She also knows how to keep writing and she knows how writing can save us.
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For more information about Sarah, her book, her publications, her blog, or her pedagogical practices and endeavors in daydreaming & magical thinking, please visit her personal website: www.SarahElizabethSchantz.org.