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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, and 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, and specifically for speaking her truth—while Sarah doesn't know if she really believes this story, she does, and has always believed in the power of metaphor.) 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 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 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, 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 before she was then nominated by the president of the college as Master Adjunct of all Front Range Community College campuses. 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 now one of the mentors 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 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/studio 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. 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, and ultimately aims to be the teacher she herself desired and needed. 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 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 died unexpectedly in 2018, followed by her father in 2023 from a Grade 4 glioblastoma that took him just twenty-one days after he first exhibited symptoms and was diagnosed.

 

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.