Draft:Sara Henning

Sara Henning
Sara Henning Sara Henning
Born	(1980-08-11) August 11, 1980 Savannah, Georgia, U.S.
Nationality	American
Alma mater	University of Georgia George Mason University University of South Dakota
Genre	Poetry
Website
https://www.sarahenningpoet.com

Sara Henning (born August 11, 1980) is an American poet and professor. She is the author of two award-winning poetry collections, View from True North, which won the 2017 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition Awards from Southern Illinois University Press, and Terra Incognita: Poems, winner of the 2021 Hollis Summers Poetry Prize from Ohio University/Swallow Press.

Life

Henning was born on August 11, 1980. She grew up in Athens, Georgia. Henning serves as the coordinator of the B.F.A. program in creative writing at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas. She also serves as poetry editor for Stephen F. Austin State University Press. Henning's work has been published or is forthcoming in journals such as Quarterly West, Crab Orchard Review, Witness, Crazyhorse, Meridian, Alaska Quarterly Review, Southern Humanities Review, and the Cincinnati Review. Her honors include the Lynda Hull Memorial Poetry Prize, the George Bogin Memorial Award, and the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award. She was a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writers' Conference.

Of her work, Khaled Mattawa has said, "the poet revisits memories, probes traumatic moments with enviable objectivity offering tender forgiveness or issuing firm judgments on the self as the case may be. And while the locus of these lyrics is that of personal experience, the poems offer a powerful indictment of the culture of violence against, and degradation of, women surrounding the speaker. The poems deliver these psychological, social and political insights with a great deal of esthetic pleasure. We are quickly and powerfully drawn into the world of these poems and into the experiences of the speaker, and by the end of our reading we find that traces of these experiences have lodged themselves within us, changing us. None of this powerful effect could have been achieved without the poet's choice and manipulation of language, which is always intuitive and surprising, creating word by word a group of poems that moves and enlightens."

Poet Maggie Smith has said, "Sara Henning's Terra Incognita opens with a dream, and the poems undo us the way dreams do, with imagery that is seared into our minds so completely we can't shake it. I left this book reluctantly, a little dazed, and wanting to go back inside the world Henning created, 'the sky dusk-raw', the stars 'moving braille'. Terra Incognita is a rare book of poems, and Henning is a rare talent."

Awards and Honors

• 2017 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition Award (View From True North), Southern Illinois University Press
• 2018 Julie Suk Award Finalist (View From True North)
• 2019 High Plains Book Award, Poetry (View From True North)
• 2021 Hollis Summers Poetry Prize (Terra Incognita), Ohio University
• 2022 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Editor's Selection (Burn), Southern Illinois University Press

Works

Full-length Collections:

• View From True North. Southern Illinois University Press. November 2018. ISBN 978-0-8093-3685-2.
• Terra Incognita: Poems. Ohio University Press / Swallow Press. March 2022. ISBN 978-0-8214-2475-9.

Chapbooks:

• Garden Effigies. dancing girl press. January 2015.

External links

• Official website
• "Poetry of grief and survival with Sara Henning", Interview with South Dakota Public Broadcasting
• "Sara Henning on 'Terra Firma'", Poetry Society of America
• "On Grief: A Conversation with Sara Henning", Poetry Foundation

Category:21st-century American poets Category:Stephen F. Austin State University faculty Category:University of Georgia alumni Category:George Mason University alumni Category:University of South Dakota alumni Category:Poets from Texas Category:Poets from Georgia (U.S. state) Category:Writers from Athens, Georgia Category:Living people Category:1980 births Category:American women poets Category:21st-century American women writers Category:American women academics