About the Poet
Sara Ryan is a poet and Assistant Professor of English living in Norfolk, Virginia. She moved to Hampton Roads in 2023 to join the faculty at Virginia Wesleyan University, where she teaches English, Creative Writing, and Editing and Publishing. She graduated with a doctorate in English from Texas Tech University in 2023. She earned her MFA from Northern Michigan University and her BA from the University of Miami. Since moving to Norfolk, Sara has involved herself in the local writing community, hosting talks at Virginia Wesleyan and Bayside Library. Her work was featured in the Elizabeth River Trail's "Poetry on the Trail" in 2024, and she won second place in the first annual "Rhythm of Life" poetry contest, hosted by Norfolk's Episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd in 2025. At VWU, she and her students started The Fishbowl Review, a new on-campus literary journal featuring creative works by VWU undergraduates.
Sara's poetry and creative nonfiction has been published widely, most notably in nationally recognized journals such as The Kenyon Review, Pleiades, DIAGRAM, Atlanta Review, The Common, Brevity, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, and many others. She was the winner of Grist Journal's 2018 Pro Forma Contest and Cutbank's 2019 Big Sky, Small Prose Contest. Her first book, I Thought There Would Be More Wolves, won the 2020 Permafrost Poetry Prize and was published by University of Alaska Press in 2021. She is also the author of two chapbooks, Never Leave the Foot of an Animal Unskinned (Porkbelly Press) and Excellent Evidence of Human Activity (The Cupboard Pamphlet). Her poetry and other writing are centered on place, the environment, and hybridity. She also experiments with image/text writing and other poetic and lyric forms.
Region
Hampton Roads
Virginia City or County Affiliation
Norfolk
Years of Residence in Virginia
2.5
Current City/State of Residence
Norfolk, VA
Gender
Female
Race/Ethnicity
White
Year of Birth
1992
Keywords/Tags
environment, women, hybridity
Website
Published Works or Performances
BOOKS/CHAPBOOKS
I Thought There Would Be More Wolves (University of Alaska Press, 2021).
Excellent Evidence of Human Activity (The Cupboard Pamphlet, 2019).
Never Leave the Foot of an Animal Unskinned (Porkbelly Press, 2018).
POETRY
“Trees and Diamonds,” “Flickers” (In Landlocked Magazine, 2024).
“Trace” (In Atticus Review, 2023)
“Ripening” (In Blood Orange Review, 2023)
“Void,” “Verge” (In Westchester Review, 2023)
“Pluck” (In Thimble Literary Magazine, 2022)
“Quadripoint,” “Flinch” (In Flyway: Journal of Writing and Environment, 2022)
“How to Be Cut Off from Civilization” (In The Hunger, 2022)
“Pothos” (In Barren Magazine, 2022)
“No God in Texas” (In EcoTheo Review, 2022)
“Ill Wind” (In Lumiere Review, 2022)
“Illuminance” (In Atlanta Review, 2021)
“We Know These Facts to Be True” (In The West Review, 2021)
“Deadening,” “Microfilm” (In Diode, 2021)
“Nesting Material” (In Poetry Northwest, 2020)
“Circumstances of Disappearance,” “A Coyote Runs Down Michigan Avenue” (In New Ohio Review, 2020)
“Every Man on Tinder Has a Gun” (In Cincinnati Review, 2020)
“I Have Masturbated Three Days in a Row and Can’t Stop Crying,” “Origin of the Mapping System” (In Kenyon Review, 2020)
(The Sims Pop-up Issue) “Suspicious Pool Ladder Incident,” “motherlode,” “Transparency” (In the winnow magazine, 2020)
“Shadows,” “Deciduous,” “Frission,” “Inspection,” “Shadow Song,” “Reflection” (In Response: a journal for new work, 2020)
“From the Window,” “She Has a Pair of Simple Eyes” (In Rewilding: Poems for the Environment, 2019)
“Talk to Eliza” (In Cherry Tree, 2019)
“Self Portrait as Mammal” (In Split Rock Review, 2019)
“Grasp” (In Thrush Poetry Journal, 2019)
“A Staked Plain” (In museum of americana, 2019)
“Growing Bone” (In Glass: A Journal of Poetry, 2019)
“I Have Found the Golden Whales” (In American Literary Review, 2019)
“Look What I Have Done” (In Anomaly, 2019)
“Call Me a Courage” (In DIALOGIST, 2019)
“Girls I Am Mistaken For,” “Heavy Furniture” (In South Dakota Review, 2018)
“In Praise of the Exoskeleton” (In Booth, 2018)
“My Father Asks If I Was Raised by a Jackal” (In Sweet, 2018)
“Rifle Season,” “A Man in a Bar Takes a Picture of Me,” “It’s Been Four Years” (In The Rumpus, 2018)
“13 Horses in Michigan” (In Midwestern Gothic, 2018)
“Love Poem in Which I Am in Love with No One,” “The Volume of a Human Heart” (In Bluestem, 2018)
“Raw Honey,” “Graft” (In Timber, 2018)
“This is the Realm of Last Chances” (In Hot Metal Bridge, 2018)
“Beast Fables” (In Gulf Stream, 2018)
“Prehistory” (In Gordon Square Review, 2018)
“Bramble and Knife” (In Sonora Review, 2018)
“Sonnet for Black Parades” (In Barrelhouse Blog, 2018)
“I Thought There Would Be More Wolves” (In Hunger Mountain, 2018)
“Your Daughter Is a Liar” (In Prairie Schooner, 2017)
“Bad Hunter,” “I Will Have Forgotten You by Sunday” (In Fairy Tale Review, 2017)
“A Man Tells Me How Difficult My Body Is” (In Tinderbox Poetry Journal (Contest Issue), 2017)
“A Girl Sings into a Well,” “Sending a Book to a Boy,” “For a Moment” (In Sequestrum, 2017)
“A Compulsion of Letters” (In Yemassee, 2017)
“Imprint,” “Fieldborn” (In Sugared Water, 2017)
“Blud Ornge” (In Slice Magazine, 2017)
“Knives Before Forks” (In New South Journal, 2017)
“Stopping Time” (In Third Coast Magazine, 2017)
“Renovation,” “Tasmanian Tiger” (In Third Point Press, 2017)
“Ode to Mammuthus Primigenius” (In Flock, 2017)
“The Farm” (In Moonsick Magazine, 2016)
“Gifts from Birds” (In Rust & Moth, 2016)
“Pantoum for Dark Lands” (In Tinderbox Poetry Journal, 2016)
“Mud Ceremony” (In Molotov Cocktail (Shadow Award Issue), 2016)
“With My Lost Saints,” “I Hope You're Hungry,” “Isms” (In Dirty Chai Magazine, 2016)
“The Midnight Hour” (In The Grief Diaries, 2016)
“Nightmare Girl,” “Boy Who Thinks the World Is Flat” (In Sweet Tree Review, 2016)
“Woolly Bones” (In Storm Cellar, 2016)
“Phaedras de Blondel,” “This History of Lungs” (In Crab Fat Magazine, 2016)
“Blossom Rot,” “Scrape” (In Reservoir Journal, 2016)
“Favor,” “Making a Meal” (In The Boiler Journal, 2015)
“Vessel” (In Bear Review, 2014)
“Love, You Sweet Dream” (In Wingbeats II: Exercises and Practice in Poetry, 2014)
“Ode to Bones” (In Boxcar Poetry Review, 2014)
NONFICTION/REVIEWS
“Fathom” (In The Common, 2025)
“Body Puzzle” (In Brevity, 2020)
“Violet Bloom” (In Redivider, 2019)
“The Lizard that Lived Forever” (In Cutbank (Winner of Big Sky, Small Prose Contest, 2019)
“Remnant” (In Pidgeonholes, 2019)
“This Was Never About Pain” (In Pleiades, 2018)
“Maybe We Will Lie About This” (In DIAGRAM, 2018)
“Search for” (In Grist (Winner of Pro Forma Contest), 2018)
“Review of ANIMALS STRIKE CURIOUS POSES by Elena Passarello” (In Barrelhouse, 2017)
Selected Individual Poems or Performances
Diode Poetry Journal - "Microfilm," 2021
Flyway Journal of Writing and Environment - "Flinch," 2022
New Ohio Review - "A Coyote Runs Down Michigan Avenue," 2020
The Kenyon Review - "Origin of the Mapping System," and "I Have Masturbated Three Days in a Row and Can't Stop Crying," 2020: in print, can be found in the attached file
Sara Ryan