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 by hitch-hiking and hopping trains around the country, doing migrant work, living on the streets or in urban camps, and also squatting abandoned (or rather, once-abandoned) houses and buildings.

 

In 2002, she returned to Colorado to be close to her parents, and to raise both her biological daughter, Story, and her bonus daughter, Kaya. Since then she has completed a BA in Writing & Literature and an MFA in Writing & Poetics.

 

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, Third Coast, The Los Angeles Review, and Modern Grimmoire. In 2015, her debut novel, Fig, came out from Simon & Schuster (declared A Best of the Year by NPR it also won 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 FRCC 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. She also is an adjunct professor at Naropa University. She is currently working on a novel titled, Roadside Altars, a novella titled Just Like Heaven, and a short story collection, Tales of Dead Children. She's had recent publications in Bombay Gin, Hunger Mountain, The Adirondack Review, and Cutthroat (an array of CNF, fiction, and poetry).

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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.