Sara Wintz
b.1985 in Los Angeles, California
B.A. in English Literature/Creative Writing, Mills College
M.F.A. in Writing, Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College
Sara Wintz is the author of Walking Across A Field We Are Focused On At This Time Now (Ugly Duckling Press), an epic poem about the 20th century exploring the foundations of facts, time, and social identity, and The Lauras (sus press), a digital chapbook written from the p.o.v. of historical figure Laura Ingalls Wilder placed within the video game Oregon Trail.
In American Poetry Review, Arielle Greenberg wrote about Walking Across A Field We Are Focused On At This Time Now: “While the milestones of history included in Walking Across a Field are culled with a feminist mission, the speaker herself is not portrayed as particularly gendered, and, in contrast to the books considered last time and those in the first part of this column, she is not girly. She's confident, empowered: ‘whenever i am ready to go, i will go, too,’ she tells us early on, speaking perhaps about death, but also about the way she's chosen to live her life. This sense of agency is echoed in the last lines of the book, a kind of ars poetica…”
Poems appear in these journals: Chicago Review, Social Text, Tupelo Quarterly, The Canary, ecopoetics, and Beijing Trondheim and anthologies: Strange Attractors: Investigations in Non-Humanoid Extraterrestrial Sexualities (Encyclopedia Destructica), Out of Everywhere 2: Linguistically Innovative Poetry by Women in North America and the UK (Reality Street), It’s night in San Francisco but it’s sunny in Oakland (Timeless, Infinite Light), and RUFFLES REPAIR AND RITUAL: The Fine Art of Fixing (Dirt Palace Projects).
Sara’s the editor of two poetry anthologies that served as exercises in community building: THE FEELING IS MUTUAL: A LIST OF OUR FUCKING DEMAND$ (Compline) and INVISIBLY TIGHT INSTITUTIONAL OUTER FLANKS DUB (verb) GLORIOUS NATIONAL HI-VIOLENCE RESPONSE DREAM: New Writing from the U.S. and U.K. (Critical Documents). Tyrone Williams reflected on The Feeling Is Mutual in Jacket2: “In other words, this is a collection of manifestos and art that gives endless pleasures to my political and erotic, social and aesthetic, sides, spheres, dimensions, what have you.”
Find their interviews with arts and cultural figures at: The Creative Independent, Artpapers, SFMOMA’s Open Space, The Poetry Foundation’s Harriet, and The Poetry Project Newsletter. They’ve curated poetry events for: Small Press Traffic, Segue Reading Series, Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive and served on the advisory boards of non-profit literary organizations Small Press Traffic and Ugly Duckling Presse.
After spending two weeks in the summer of 2017 as an artist-in-residence at Dirt Palace, Sara relocated to Providence, Rhode Island. They participated in the third cohort of artists-in-residence at the Wedding Cake House and in 2023 they were one of seven local poets invited to contribute poems to The Word Shelter, a sign/public art project in front of the Wedding Cake House built by Shaun Bullens, curated by Xander Marro and Pippi Zornoza of Dirt Palace Projects.