Sarah T. Jewell is a poet, librarian, and writing workshop moderator based in New York City. Her full-length debut collection Motherhome is forthcoming from Shanti Arts in January 2027. She has also published a poetry chapbook titled How to Break Your Own Heart available from dancing girl press. Her poetry has appeared in Rattle, Mudfish, wildscape, and other journals.
She has led community poetry workshops since 2016, inspiring poetry written by both adults and children, non-native English speakers, neurodivergent artists, medical students, and other writing groups. She also develops writing exercises on a regular basis on her Substack Patchwork Poetry Prompts, with an emphasis on making the ordinary extraordinary, ekphrasis, and elegies. She also works with poets revising and editing chapbooks and full-length manuscripts. Through her writing and teaching, Jewell seeks to foster curiosity, community, and a deeper engagement with contemporary poetry.
Advance Praise for Motherhome
“Sarah T. Jewell’s Motherhome opens with the illness and death of a beloved parent. It is a personal tragedy faced head-on. However, this is a book which disobeys the parameters of the elegiac, subverting our expectations in its unflinching and wit-tinged treatment of loss, madness, faith, caregiving, scientific and biological phenomena, and feminine agency. Jewell’s handling of form—including the jangled musicality of her Shakespearean sonnets and the use of the normally ecstatic ghazal to transmit the constant low hum of grief (“Stone”) is exceptional. This is a bracing and necessary collection.”
Alexandra Oliver, Author of Meeting the Tormentors in Safeway and Hail, the Invisible Watchman
“In Motherhome, Sarah T. Jewell pulls on imagery from myriad sources—medical research, religion, art, childhood—to explore the reverberating experience of her mother’s illness and death. At times conversational, at times linguistically playful, at times enigmatic, this collection evokes a complex psychological journey by way of startling and resonant juxtapositions. These poems are rigorous, tender, and invigorating. I loved lingering over Jewell’s words.”
Helen Phillips, author of Hum and The Need