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 interprets scapes (landscape, homescape, culturescape) in both traditional and contemporary ways, exploring 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 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 Indiana, Bellingham 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 twice been nominated for a Puschart Prize. She was selected for inclusion in the Kentucky Great Writers Series, and has served as artist-in-residence for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Catoctin Mountain National Park, Acadia National Park, and Shotpouch Cabin through Oregon State University.

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