Dr. Sarah Jefferis is an author, editor, writing coach, and speaker. Through her business, Write. Now., Dr. Jefferis serves as a 1:1 writing coach for creatives/educators/activists/athletes/faith leaders who need assistance at any stage of their creative project and across multiple disciplines and genres. She designs writing workshops to explore issues of equity and inclusion, as well as generative workshops in poetry and non-fiction. Additionally, she offers poetry readings, presentations on diversity, and interactive dialogues on using writing as a healing modality for sexual assault survivors. Jefferis holds an MA in Creative Writing and Literature from Hollins University, an MFA in Poetry from Cornell University, and a PhD in Creative Writing from SUNY Binghamton. She has over twenty years of teaching writing and literature at Cornell University.
Her most recent poetry collection, What Enters the Mouth, was published in February 2017 by Standing Stone Books. It was praised by Ansel Elkins, author of Blue Yodel, who wrote, “these are fearless poems—a reckoning of the violence of girlhood rendered with grit and clarity.” Forgetting the Salt, her first book of poetry was published by Foothills Press in 2008. Her poems and nonfiction and fiction have appeared in The North American Review, The Cimarron Review, Rhino, The Mississippi Review, The American Literary Review, Stone Canoe, Icon, The Hollins Critic, The Patterson Review, The Healing Muse, and other journals. She has been both a poetry and fiction fellow at the Squaw Valley Community of Writers in California and held residencies in poetry and creative nonfiction at the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts in New York and at The Studios at Mass MOCA. She has completed her first novel, entitled Franny and John, as well as her third collection of poetry, After Marriage. She is working on a collection of essays about the challenge of solo motherhood in a pandemic. She has recently become a certified Yoga teacher through Mighty Yoga in Ithaca, NY. Her most important calling is to raise two powerful feminist girls who love themselves and who are willing to speak out against injustice.