BIO
Sarah Rose Nordgren is a poet, essayist, and teacher. Her most recent book is The Creation Museum (Harbor Editions, 2022), and her previous books include Best Bones (2014), winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, and Darwin’s Mother (2017), a finalist for the 2018 Ohioana Book Award, both from University of Pittsburgh Press. Her poems and essays appear widely in periodicals such as Agni, Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review Online, Copper Nickel, and American Poetry Review, and she creates video and performance text art in collaboration with Kathleen Kelley under the name Smart Snow. Nordgren’s first nonfiction book, The Bird Hat Wearer’s Journal, won the 2021 Essay Press Book Prize and is forthcoming in Spring 2024.
Among her awards are two winter fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council, and fellowships and scholarships from the Sewanee and Bread Loaf Conferences, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. Nordgren holds a BA from Sarah Lawrence College, an MFA in poetry from University of North Carolina Greensboro, and a PhD in English and Creative Writing from University of Cincinnati where she also earned a Graduate Certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.
Sarah Rose lives in Durham, North Carolina, where she teaches poetry, serves as Emerging Poet Feature editor for 32 Poems, and directs The School for Living Futures, an experimental, interdisciplinary school dedicated to creating new knowledge and possibility for our climate-changed future.
