Lecturer, Creative Writing and Literature Program
About
Sarah Messer, poet and nonfiction writer, has received fellowships and grants from the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the NEA, the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs, and the Mellon Foundation. In 2008-2009 she was a fellow in poetry at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (Bunting) at Harvard. She is the author of four books: a hybrid history/memoir, Red House (Viking), a book of translations, Having Once Paused: Poems of Zen Master Ikkyu (University of Michigan Press) and two poetry books, Bandit Letters (New Issues), and Dress Made of Mice (Black Lawrence Press). Her work has appeared in theParis Review, the Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, and Ploughshares, among others. For many years she taught as an Associate Professor in the MFA/BFA program at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. Her teaching interests include lyric essay, memoir, poetry, prose poetry, experimental fiction and poetry, the long poem and series poems, found poetry, women and autobiography. She has also taught special topics courses like the lyric essay, first books, the elegy, devotional/Buddhist writing, the history of the memoir in America, the manifesto, the broadside, procedural poetics and non-traditional forms. In 2010, Messer co-founded One Pause Poetry, an on-line audio archive and reading series in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Currently she teaches for the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown’s on-line writing program, 24 Pearl Street, and is a cheese maker at White Lotus Farms.
