Discovering Sarah Piatt - America’s Lost Great Writer

In this episode, we speak with Piatt researcher Sean E. Andres.  A secondary educator and marketing expert by training, Sean specializes in public history projects, with a particular focus on historically marginalized populations in the Cincinnati area.  Sean talks about how he initially found Sarah, compelled by her work speaking out against social norms of her time.  He reflects on connections between her poems and the deep history of Cincinnati and surrounding lands, where Sarah and her husband J.J. long made their family home, and about the practicalities and challenges of conducting original archival research.  

Interview date: 23 January 2023

In this episode, Piatt researcher Sean E. Andres reads and explores Sarah Piatt’s poem “If I Had Made the World,” the poem that spurred his initial interest in her work. “If I Had Made the World” was published in the rare Washington, D.C. newspaper The Capital on 5 Nov. 1876.  Our podcast host Elizabeth Renker opens the episode with a short overview of the historical backdrop to the poem.

Recording date: 15 March 2023; date of Renker’s introduction: 20 September 2023

In this first part of a two-part episode, we speak with Bridget Striker, the Director of the Boone County Borderlands Archive and History Center at the Boone County Public Library in Burlington, KY.  An anthropologist and librarian by training, Bridget brings her expertise in archaeology, mapping, and historic preservation into her work on Boone County’s complex history.  Bridget discusses the ancestors of Sarah’s husband, John James Piatt, who were among the white settlers granted large tracts of land along the Ohio River for Revolutionary War service, and she situates them in social networks and enslavement practices of this place and time.

Interview date: 13 March 2023

In this second part of a two-part episode, we continue our conversation with Bridget Striker, the Director of the Boone County Borderlands Archive and History Center at the Boone County Public Library in Burlington, KY.  An anthropologist and librarian by training, Bridget brings her expertise in archaeology, mapping, and historic preservation into her work on Boone County’s complex history.  Bridget discusses enslavement practices in Boone County, Kentucky; the Kentucky relatives of Sarah’s husband John James Piatt who were enslavers; the existing documentation about the people the Kentucky Piatts enslaved and their efforts to seek their freedom; and the complexities of the lives of enslaved people, especially in the borderlands region of Kentucky, Ohio, and Indiana.

Interview date: 14 March 2023

In this episode, we speak with Joe Lockard, an associate professor of English at Arizona State University.  Joe is a specialist in nineteenth-century American literature, particularly the literature of U.S. slavery and early African American literature.  Joe talks about his groundbreaking research recovering the life and work of Mattie Griffith, a young Kentucky poet.  In the 1850s, when Sarah was breaking out as famous teen poet Sallie M. Bryan, she shared social circles with Mattie by way of their shared mentor, Louisville Daily Journal editor George D. Prentice.  Mattie’s hatred of enslavement led her to leave Kentucky for the North, where she published a pseudo-slave narrative titled Autobiography of a Female Slave—which made her famous in the abolitionist movement and a pariah back home.

Interview date: 2 February 2024

In this first part of a two-part episode, we speak with Stephanie Burt, a poet, a literary critic, and a professor of English at Harvard University. A recipient of a 2016 Guggenheim Fellowship, she’s the author of many books, including her volume of poems, We Are Mermaids; her award-winning anthology of post-Stonewall queer poetry, Super Gay Poems; and her just-out Taylor’s Version: The Poetic and Musical Genius of Taylor Swift. The New York Times called Burt “one of the most influential poetry critics of her generation.”  Stephanie tells us about how she first encountered Sarah’s poems and why they stand out as the work of a distinctive and major writer.  She also reads and discusses her gateway poem, “A Lesson in a Picture.”  

Interview date: 26 September 2025

In this episode, our podcast host Elizabeth Renker introduces Stephanie Burt to her own favorite poem of Sarah’s, “Mock Diamonds,” one of her great poems of the Reconstruction period immediately following the U.S. Civil War. Elizabeth reads the poem aloud and tells us about the historical background.  She and Stephanie break the poem down stanza by stanza, exploring how Sarah created an appealing surface for general readers and a simultaneous deeper layer that scrutinizes white nostalgia for the Old South, the emergent Lost Cause ideology, and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan.  Stephanie calls “Mock Diamonds” “a poem for our time.”

Interview date: 26 September 2025

This episode is a cross-post from our sibling podcast Voices of Excellence that explores research in progress at The Ohio State University, hosted by historian and professor David Staley. David interviews our podcast host Elizabeth Renker about her multiple projects designed to reclaim Piatt’s legacy as America’s lost great writer, among them The Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt Recovery Project, available free on the web.  They also discuss Elizabeth’s ongoing work on her biography of Sarah, the challenges of archival research, her views on the evolving nature of English departments, and her award-winning teaching methodologies.

Interview date: 2 October 2024

Who was Sarah Piatt? Why has she been rediscovered a century after her death in 1919? And what makes her America’s lost great writer? Professor Elizabeth Renker introduces listeners to Sarah as an innovative and fierce woman writer whose voice grappled with personal and social cataclysms and conventions during a tumultuous time in US and transatlantic history. 

In this first episode, we speak with pioneering Piatt scholar Paula Bernat Bennett. In 2001, Paula published the first university-press edition of Sarah’s work.  Paula talks about how she came to find Sarah; why Sarah’s voice stood out; social expectations for woman poets; and Sarah and Emily Dickinson as contemporaries. Paula chose her edition’s title, Palace-Burner, from Sarah’s poem about women’s role in the violent social unrest of the 1871 Paris Commune.  It became her pithy phrase for Sarah herself–and her insistent challenges to gender norms.

Interview date: September 9, 2017