Teachers & Writers Collaborative

Sarah Dohrmann

Sarah has been a T&W writer-in-residence since 2001. She teaches poetry and prose writing to all ages of New York City children in both general and special education. Sarah asks students to mine their lived experiences with honesty and humility, while encouraging them to extend their imaginations fully in their work, so as to encounter themselves and their characters with compassion. She uses contemporary multicultural literature as models of fine, meaningful writing.

Sarah has also taught creative writing in Special Programs at Sarah Lawrence College since 2003.

Sarah received the 2009 New York Foundation for the Arts Award in Nonfiction Literature. In 2007–2008, she was a Fulbright Scholar living in Morocco, where she worked on a book of nonfiction and learned to speak Arabic. In 2006, Sarah’s essay “Teenage Boy Gunned Down,” which addresses the sudden death of one of her students as well as race in the classroom, was selected as a finalist for T&W’s Bechtel Prize. Also in 2006, Sarah was a Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation Fellow at The Millay Colony for the Arts. In 2004, she earned her MFA in fiction writing at Sarah Lawrence College, where she also conducted an in-depth study of creative writing as it relates to emotionally disturbed children in New York City schools. Sarah was a fellow at the Summer Literary Seminars in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 2004, and a finalist for the Iowa Award in Fiction in 2003.

Born and raised in Iowa, Sarah has also lived in Washington, DC, and in Los Angeles. She’s been a New Yorker for 10 years and now lives in Brooklyn.