Sarah McCartt-Jackson

Kentucky poet, naturalist, folklorist, and educator Sarah McCartt-Jackson has spent decades developing her craft, dedicating her art to exploring the natural and cultural world that encompasses all who share in planet life. Her poetry inspires others to connect, reflect, meditate, and act for the future of our ecosystems of all sizes: valley, prairie, forest, fern. Her poetry explores biological and cultural diversity, cultural history as embodied in tangible and intangible resources, and profound experience rooted in pleasure, sanctuary, and wilderness.

Sarah is the author of Stonelight (Airlie Press), which won the 2020 Phillip H. McMath Post Publication Book Award, 2018 Weatherford Award in Poetry and the 2017 Airlie Prize, and three chapbooks: Calf Canyon (Brain Mill Press), Vein of Stone (Porkbelly Press), and Children Born on the Wrong Side of the River (Casey Shay Press), which won the 2015 Mary Ballard Poetry Prize. Her poetry has appeared in About Place Journal, Indiana Review, Journal of American Folklore, The Maine Review, NANO Fiction, among many others. In recognition of artistic excellence, she received an Al Smith Individual Artist Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize four times. She was selected for inclusion in the Kentucky Great Writers Series, and has served as artist-in-residence for four National Parks: Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Acadia National Park, Catoctin Mountain National Park, and Homestead National Historical Park.

Read some poems here. Find her newest collection here. Click here to contact her for classroom presentations, intensive workshops, individual consultations, readings, and appearances.

Photo credit: Karin Partin Wells, 2014