sara michas-martin

about

Sara Michas-Martin is a poet and nonfiction writer who draws inspiration from science and the natural world. Her book Gray Matter (Fordham University Press), was chosen by Susan Wheeler for the Poets Out Loud Prize and nominated for a Colorado Book Award. Current projects include a nonfiction manuscript (Black Boxes) that draws on medical, cultural and natural history to consider how the logic of the reproductive body corresponds, or is in tension with, current ecological and social systems. Fire Season, a poetry manuscript in progress, takes on deep ecology and the ethics of care in a moment of environmental precarity.

Sara holds a BFA in visual art from the University of Michigan and an MFA in poetry from the University of Arizona. Her work has been supported by a Wallace Stegner fellowship from Stanford University, grants from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg prize, as well as fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, VCCA, the Marble House Project, and the Bread Loaf and Community of Writers’ conferences. Recent poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in the American Poetry Review, Copper Nickel, CrazyHorse, Harvard Review, The Glacier, The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), Kenyon Review, KR Online, New England Review, Poetry Northwest, Terrain.org and elsewhere. Her work has been nominated several times for the Pushcart Prize and received “notable essay” mentions in the 2023 Best American Nonfiction Essays and the 2023 Best American Science and Nature Writing anthologies, edited by Vivian Gornik and Carl Zimmer, respectively. She has taught writing and interdisciplinary studies for the University of Michigan, Goddard College, Lighthouse Writer’s Workshop and currently teaches creative writing and environmental humanities at Stanford University.

gray matter

“How much of a body is a spirit, and vice versa? Does the biology of our minds make for our behavior, become our destinies? Can we make choices not determined by the chemistries that comprise our brains? What does this mean for free will and fate, and for faith itself? Is the spirit quantifiable?

Each era of scientific revolution - a reconceiving of our world as well as the terms in which science defines it - has had its own profound poetries, from Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales to William Carlos Williams' The Desert Music and Other Poems. Now Sara Michas-Martin's Gray Matter evokes our most immediate scientific revolution, the discovery of the interdependence of biology and environment - even if we don't yet understand to what extent each is altered by the other, and just what the effects may be. It is no accident that its title echoes that of George Oppen's post-nuclear masterpiece, The Materials. As Oppen presaged, material is altered by matter's will.”

— Susan Wheeler, Judge, Poets Out Loud Prize.
Full Introduction HERE

“These poems are kaleidoscopic and pulsing; their living focus shows us that instability too has its elegance, that thought like music is in movement. This is a vibrant, beautifully synaptic book."

— Dean Young

"Around the head / stirs a haze of gases" says Sara Michas-Martin, an epistomological-poet, one who works stubbornly at knowing and simultaneously examines the equipment and mechanisms by which we attempt to know.”

—Tony Hoagland

"This eloquent work offers the reader a rare mix of lyrical intensity and abstract rigor. These are poems of inner adventure and outward event, the one sometimes easing into the other like figures at dusk. The narratives here are compelling and the craft hard-earned, making for a wonderful debut collection."

—Eavan Boland

"What do I know about poetry? Brains are my business. Well, I know this: great poetry takes the brain by surprise (not merely the reflective self) knocking the neurons out of kilter, just a little, but enough to shock them into fresh patterns of perception, if only for an instant. Gray Matter is an extraordinary collection. I read it, neurons a-buzz, in a single, absorbed sitting. I’m not sure that’s what one is supposed to do with poems as rich, visceral and playfully profound as these.”