Sarah Passino

Sarah Passino’s poetry is based in the everyday, most specifically how the everyday is shaped by both the alienating political and economic forces at work in our social lives, and the abundant possibilities within shared and collective desires for change. Written in a colloquial and conversational style, her work is deeply human, earnest, and empathetic. Her nominator writes, “Sarah’s writing is a result of direct and personal engagement. Her work is never pedantic but the organic culmination of her love and respect for the world and its people, her great knowledge, and her extraordinary talent.” Her poems have appeared in Brooklyn Rail, Berkeley Poetry Review, DIAGRAM, and Boston Review.

 

Passino was a Poets House Fellow in 2018 and received the 92nd Street Y Rachel Wetzsteon Poetry Prize in 2017. Her book Versioning Sappho Versioning will be published by Stereoverse this fall. She received her B.A. from the University of Wisconsin, her M.A. from Columbia University’s Teachers College, and her M.A. and Ph.D. in English from Vanderbilt University. Presently, she’s a freelance writer and editor and an instructor at the Bard Prison Initiative. Her Writer’s Award will allow her to focus on her writing projects full-time. “With support from the Foundation, I could give time to the projects I have started but have not had time to finish and I could realize them in communities most directly impacted by the social problems and social conditions my work works through.” She lives in Brooklyn, New York.