Sara Michas-Martin

Artist Statement

I am interested in an ecologically-minded poetics that formally explores the possibility of language to embody energy and meaning through collage, rhythmic pattern and arrangement. My poems utilize eliding syntax and fracture to illustrate the pace of environmental change, the fluid boundaries between self and other, human and non-human, and the push and pull between responsibility and vulnerability while parenting in the Anthropocene.

Book Cover, Cover art: Albín Brunovský Lady with a Hat II.

Bio

Sara Michas-Martin is a poet and nonfiction writer who draws inspiration from science and the natural world. Her book Gray Matter (Fordham University Press), was chosen by Susan Wheeler for the Poets Out Loud Prize and nominated for a Colorado Book Award. Works-in-progress include a nonfiction manuscript (Black Boxes) that draws on medical, cultural and natural history to consider how the logic of the maternal body corresponds, or is in tension with, current ecological and social systems. Hold it All, a poetry manuscript in progress, takes on deep ecology and the ethics of care in a moment of environmental precarity. Sara’s work has been supported by a Wallace Stegner fellowship in poetry from Stanford University, grants from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg prize, as well as fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center and the Bread Loaf and Community of Writers’ conferences. Recent poems and essays have appeared in the American Poetry Review, CrazyHorse, The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), Kenyon Review, New England Review, Poetry Northwest, Terrain.org and elsewhere. She teaches creative writing and environmental humanities at Stanford University.

saramichasmartin.com