Sarah was raised by a flock of gentle beings: two musicians, the Wasatch Mountains, the Wind Rivers, and Great Salt Lake. She comes from five generations of Mormon stock and is a daughter of the land. Her home is with traditional Shoshone territories and mountains in Utah, though she has also lived and loved in Kenya and New Zealand and is partial to the beings of Nepal, British Columbia, and Ecuador.
Sarah's life is given to the more-than-human world, and it is from these various teachers that she takes her directives. She is an Earth-based poet, performer, & multidisciplinary artist who works in embedded conversation with the animate beings around her. Drawing on experience in music, movement, writing, listening to the land, and Earth-based healing and activism, her process has ears that prick to the smallest glints of the sentient world. Her work responds to and collaborates with these voices, seeking to entangle humans with what David Abram calls "earthly cosmologies," or the sacred as wildly enfleshed in the beings around us.
Her publications include poetry in national reviews The American Journal of Poetry, Calyx Journal, and Sugar House Review, as well as an essay exploring Mormon multispecies kindreds and a dance-poetry film for Great Salt Lake. Her poetry will be included in the forthcoming anthology, "A Literary Field Guide to the Rocky Mountains." Sarah was Poet-in-Residence for Sitka Center for Art and Ecology's Winter 2024-2025 season.
Sarah earned her Master's degree in socio-ecology in 2024, where she researched Mormon and agricultural settler environmental perceptions and multispecies justice in the Intermountain West. She worked both as part of a Shoshone project restoring the site of the Bear River Massacre and with downstream efforts to save Great Salt Lake. During her time there, she was awarded USU's 2024 Advocacy Student of the Year in Sustainability for her multispecies justice work with Great Salt Lake. She is currently pursuing an Environmental Sociology PhD continuing her research on multispecies justice in the Great Salt Lake watershed.
Recent performances include international gatherings for the more-than-human world; the Indigenous offering ceremony for Great Salt Lake; protest performance projects; and a show of collaborative ecological works. Current projects include a Great Salt Lake art and poetry exhibit, Earth connection workshops; multispecies sentience & justice performances, research, and organizing; and various ritual activist efforts for and with Great Salt Lake.
Sarah serves on two non-profit boards: 1) Bichu-Nanewe (Return of the People), which empowers Native Cultural Resurgence, uplifts Ecological Tribal Knowledge, and works for Tribal Sovereignty, and 2) Los Cedros (The Cedars) Fund, a group supporting the conservation of one of the most biodiverse and mysterious forests in the world, nestled in the mists of the Ecuadorian cloud forest. Sarah is also affiliated with New York University's More-than-Human Life Project and the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature.
Sarah's primary teachers include a council of apple trees, Great Salt Lake, David Abram, shadows and lights playing above a stream, the Winds, Kirsten Vinyeta, a fallen birch tree in the hills near her home, hermit thrushes, Darren Parry, mycelia, a dog called Magpie, yarrow, phalaropes, jumping spiders, Katrina Curry, and snakes of many shapes.
