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 the author of Country of Glass, a poetry collection published by Gallaudet University Press in May 2022.
Her poems, essays, reviews, interviews, and prose have been published in The Atlantic, Bear Review, The Guardian, The Nation, The New York Times, Poetry Daily, The Rumpus, RHINO Poetry, Slate, The Washington Post, and many others. In 2022, Sarah collaborated with the filmmaker Lydia Cornett on a film installation 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 has also edited The Deaf Poets Society, a now-defunct magazine featuring work by D/deaf and disabled artists and writers that she cofounded (it was her brainchild) in 2016-2021; 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. She has taught creative writing to undergraduates at Gallaudet University and American University. By day, Sarah works as the Program Associate for the American Bar Association’s Commission on Disability Rights.
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