Poet, middle-grade verse novelist, essayist, journalist, and editor.
Image description: Sarah Katz, a white woman, speaks into a microphone at a reading in a café. She has long, dark brown hair and is wearing a slate gray dress, a pink cardigan, and an orange lanyard with her name on the attached card.
Image description: Sarah Katz, a white woman with long, wavy dark brown hair.
About Sarah
Sarah Katz is a deaf writer in Northern Virginia who experiments across genres.
She is the author of Country of Glass, a poetry collection published by Gallaudet University Press in May 2022, which received praise from poets Raymond Antrobus and Ilya Kaminsky, and, for an earlier version submitted to Tupelo Press’ 2016 Dorset Prize, former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky. Her poetry has been published in Bear Review, Poetry Daily, Public Pool, RHINO Poetry, The Shallow Ends, and many others. In 2022, Sarah collaborated with the filmmaker Lydia Cornett on a film in which she performed an original poem about lipreading, “They Fall Apart” in American Sign Language, Cued American English, and spoken English. It has appeared at Ohio State University (2023) and the National Arts Club (2024).
Sarah also writes essays and articles about disability issues for publications such as The Atlantic, The New York Times, and Slate. She is primarily interested in how disability rights issues intersect with politics, technology, and culture, but has also written creative nonfiction about her experiences as a deaf person. Sarah regularly contributes articles to the Disability & Philanthropy Forum’s Resource Library.
Outside of nonfiction and poetry, Sarah writes contemporary middle-grade fiction. She is currently working on a novel-in-verse for kids ages 8-10 about D/deaf and hard-of-hearing theater kids.
Sarah has edited for several digital and print publications, including The Deaf Poets Society, a magazine featuring work by D/deaf and disabled artists and writers that she cofounded (it was her brainchild) in 2016; The Appeal, a nonprofit news organization dedicated to exposing “the harms of a criminal legal system entrenched in centuries of systemic racism”; and The Writer’s Chronicle, a magazine for writers published by the Association of Writers & Writing Programs.
Sarah earned her Bachelor of Arts in English Language & Literature (with a minor in Philosophy) from the University of Maryland, College Park, and her Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from American University, where she received the Myra Sklarew Award for Most Extraordinary Thesis. She has taught creative writing to undergraduates at Gallaudet University and American University. By day, Sarah is the Program Associate for the American Bar Association’s Commission on Disability Rights, where she creates content and resources relevant to the legal profession and the disability rights field generally.
My Latest:
Disability & Philanthropy Forum: How Funders Can Increase Disabled Women’s and Birthing People’s Access to Reproductive Healthcare
Image description: A collection of people at the 2017 Women’s March wearing winter hats, many of them pink “cat” hats. In the center of the image is a sign two people are holding up that reads, “Nasty Women Unite!”
Image description: Book cover. Centered text (top to bottom): COUNTRY of GLASS (sans serif font); poems (script font); Sarah Katz (serif font). The cover has a white background with three circles in varying sizes and three varying shades of yellow.
Sarah’s debut poetry collection is available now!
Country of Glass is the debut poetry collection from Sarah Katz, who explores the concept of precariousness as it applies to bodies, families, countries, and whole societies. Katz employs themes of illness, disability, war, and survival within the contexts of family history and global historical events. The collection moves through questions about identity, storytelling, displacement, and trauma, constructing an overall narrative about what it means to love while trying to survive. The poems in this book—which take the form of free verse, prose poems, sestinas, and erasures—attempt to address human fragility and what resilience looks like in a world where so much is uncertain.
Praise for Country of Glass
“On these pages … always there is a human emotion, human tenderness towards the world, always there is precision. Indeed, Country of Glass is a wonderful book.”
—Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic
“Country Of Glass is a brave and evocative book of lyrics by a poet that is not only searching for something real but is also wondering what makes us human and where we find the line between tenderness and cruelty.”
—Raymond Antrobus, author of The Perseverance
Now at the beginning of her career—and I imagine for the rest of it—we have a poet who has set out to examine every mote of dust, every nightmare, every forest full of horses through the pinhole of the marvelous. And she does, she does."
—David Keplinger, author of Ice
Contact Sarah.
Send freelance writing or editing requests, or just say hello.
Email: sarahbea89@gmail.com