Sarah Hannah

Sarah Hannah was a poet and educator from Massachusetts. Her first book, Longing Distance (Tupelo Press, 2004), was a semifinalist for the Yale Younger Poets Prize, and earned nominations for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, the Norma Farber Award, two Pushcart Prizes, and the Foreword Prize. Her second collection, Inflorescence, was published by Tupelo Press in 2007. Her poems were published in The Southern Review, Parnassus, Western Humanities Review, Gulf Coast, Boulevard, Agni, Rattapallax, Michigan Quarterly Review, Southern Humanities Review, and other journals.

Eva Salzman wrote of Hannah’s books in Contemporary Poetry Review:

Linguistically and tonally, all her poetry has an extraordinary richness. Both volumes reviewed here [Longing Distance and Inflorescence] are “of equal and abiding value”; one hears in the first the echoes preceding the sounds themselves in the second, with that book’s perhaps more sensational provenance (it was published posthumously). Sarah departed just as she neared the peak of her powers. Read, admired, and loved in her lifetime, she should have been read more while she lived.

Hannah earned a BA from Wesleyan University and an MFA and a PhD from Columbia University. She was an editor at Barrow Street Press and Poet Laureate of The Friends of Hemlock Gorge, an organization of nature conservators in Newton, Massachusetts. She was awarded a Governor’s Fellowship for residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts for the summers of 2001, 2002, and 2006.

Sarah Hannah grew up in Newton, Massachusetts. Her mother, father, and stepmother practiced and taught visual art, which influenced her writing practice. Until her death in 2007, Hannah taught poetry writing and literature at Emerson College.