About

Sarah Crossland grew up in a split-level house in Manassas, Virginia. She attended Woodbridge Senior High School’s Center for the Fine and Performing Arts (CFPA) Program for creative writing, where she studied writing across the genres for four years. She received her BA in storytelling (fiction, poetry, and folklore) from the University of Virginia in May 2011 and her MFA in poetry from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in May 2013. She also attended the Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets in June 2011.

Sarah served as the editor-in-chief of Woodbridge’s Eddas, a nationally award-winning literary-arts magazine, from 2005 to 2007. In 2009, she cofounded the hands-on, DIY literary-arts magazine Glass, Garden, and served as its editor-in-chief until 2011. She has also read submissions for Meridian at the University of Virginia and served as an intern at AGNI in Boston. Through her MFA, she served as the managing editor and webmaster of Devil’s Lake, an online journal based at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. After moving back to Virginia, she stayed on staff as the production editor for Devil’s Lake.

Sarah taught a creative writing special topics course (Inspiration, Muse, and Genesis in Creative Writing) while a fourth year student at the University of Virginia. During her MFA at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, she taught both English 203: Introduction to Creative Writing and English 100: Introduction to Composition. She also co-facilitated the Fiction Reading Class at Oakhill Correctional Institution from the spring of 2012 to the spring of 2013. She taught two sections of English 150: Introduction to Composition at Longwood University in the fall of 2013 and one section of  ISHU 3330: Write Where You Are for UVA’s BIS Program in the summer of 2014. From the winter of 2014 to the winter of 2015, she worked for WriterHouse, a nonprofit in Charlottesville dedicated to promoting creative writing in the community. She then went on to serve as the executive director at Indie Film Minute, a radio program and entertainment website where she worked to champion the voices of women and people of color in independent film. 

Sarah was invited to read her poetry at the Library of Congress’s Poetry at Noon March 2011 Event, “Reversals of Fortune.” She is the winner of Boston Review‘s 2012 Poetry Contest, a 2013 AWP Intro Journals Award, the 2013 August Derleth Prize from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the 2013 Pablo Neruda Prize from Nimrod. She was also recently named one of Narrative‘s “30 Below 30: New and Emerging Authors” picks for 2014. Her manuscript God Factory was a finalist for the 2012 Milkweed Editions Lindquist & Vennum Prize in Poetry.

Sarah’s manuscripts Tomorrowland and Impostress are under consideration at first book contests. She is currently writing a new manuscript about the Romanov daughters and the Russian Revolution titled The Winter Palace.

Sarah currently works as the marketing and communications director at New Dominion Bookshop, and in her spare time she enjoys gourmet cooking and baking, historical trivia, the Criterion Collection, and traveling to America’s National Parks.