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Sarah Elizabeth Schantz was born in Boulder, Colorado on a full moon in June of 1976, "sunny side-up" as the midwives say, with the cord wrapped around her neck. (Thirty-one years after she was born, a psychic told her she dropped into this life from a past life where she'd been hanged for witchcraft, specifically for speaking her truth—while Sarah doesn't know if she believes this story, she does, and will always believe in the power of metaphor, thus she believes in the metaphor of the tale.) She was raised in a bookstore by parents who taught her to worship at the altar of literature. For reasons too complicated to articulate here, Sarah officially left home at the age of 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 squatting abandoned (or once-abandoned) houses and buildings. In 1998, she ended up in rural Tennessee where she fell in love with the person who would eventually become her husband and gave birth to her biological daughter Story in 2000 having 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 without ever graduating from high school or even getting 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 such as Midwestern Gothic, Hunger Mountain, Third Coast, 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 before she was named Master Adjunct of all Front Range Community College campuses by the president of the school. She 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 a mentor for The Post-Grad Book Project). She adjuncts at Naropa University and teaches here and there for different organizations and for different reasons; if you are interested in hiring her to teach for you, please email writesofpassage13@gmail.com.

 

Sarah lives in a Victorian bungalow on the east side of Old Town Longmont close to the tracks and the nostalgic rumble of freight trains passing through. She has three cats: Tilly is the matriarch calico familiar from Taos, New Mexico; Cinder is a gray rescue from Lubbock, Texas with a raspy Tom Waits' meow and an Eeyore disposition; and Ponyboy, a once feral Siamese kitten from Casper, Wyoming turned sweetheart who loves to cuddle and to play.

 

Sarah is currently working on three novels: Just Like Heaven is loosely based on the true story of Sol Pais, but is very much fictionalized as it follows the trajectory of eighteen-year-old Eve who gets stuck in the bardo after killing herself; Eve believed she would not die, but travel back in time instead to stop the Columbine massacre but instead is forced to face the repercussions of her suicide by being made to bear witness not only to her loved ones deep grief, but the butterfly effect her choices have on everyone her death touches; Roadside Altars uses the major arcana from the Tarot as a storyline and narrative structure as three generations of women—all with the sight to see what others can't—attempt to break the family curse that anyone they fall in love with will die sometimes within the next three years; the third book, Secret Santa, is about a young widow who never celebrated Christmas growing up, but when her Yule-tide loving husband dies, she attempts to honor him by going all out for their daughter—however, our protagonist ends up having sex with Santa Clause every Christmas Eve for ten years in a row (or is he a stranger breaking into her house or a fantasy fueled by loneliness and what is called "Widow's Fire"?). She is also drafting a book on the craft of creative writing and divinatory poetics that will explore her personal experience as an author, lessons learned from years of developing her pedagogy, and the ways she utilizes the oracular to "see to see." In addition to these projects, she is also working on two different collections—one of short stories, and one of poetry. (Both collections examine grief but also girlhood/womanhood/motherhood/widowhood and what it means to keep becoming.)

 

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). She has four different poems coming out soon; "Hope Chest" and "Parched" will be featured in the next issue of Bombay Gin (2026) while the new literary journal, Not Quite Right, will be publishing her ghazal, "The Trigeminal Nerve," a villanelle titled, "This is not my first apocalypse," and providing a second home/publication resurrection for her short story, "Thank You For Coming" (sometime in 2026 too).

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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 she understands the challenges that low-income writers encounter; she would not be where she is 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/studio if that is where they indeed 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. Her pedagogy centers around the notion that she serves other writers as their creative writing midwife, helping them to conceive, gestate, and deliver their narratives; she utilizes several practices and ideologies covered by Felicia Rose Chavez in The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop, Ariel Gore in The Wayward Writer, and Natalie Goldberg in Writing Down the Bones, and ultimately aims to be the teacher she herself desired and needed once upon a time. 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 in the early 2000s. She's worked as a housecleaner, a nanny, and a janitor. She knows chronic pain and she knows grief. She wrote her first book Fig while caring for her mother at home who was dying from pancreatic cancer, and since then, in addition to losing way too many friends, her oldest daughter, Kaya Sabasha Fisher, died unexpectedly in 2018; in June of 2023, her father died from a Grade 4 glioblastoma (that took him just twenty-one days after he was diagnosed); and then, on December 17th, 2024, after twenty-six years of marriage, friendship, and absolute partnership, her beloved husband Fish died too from complications triggered by a massive heart attack.

 

She 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.