Sarah Elaine Smith

Sarah Elaine Smith is the author of Marilou Is Everywhere and I Live in a Hut. She holds a BA in creative writing and literature from Carnegie Mellon University, an MFA in poetry and fiction from the Michener Center for Writers at UT Austin, and an MFA in fiction from the University of Iowa.

Sarah and Scott Andrew have been life-long friends who started working together on publications and musical performance-based projects in high school. In recent years, she has also worked on multiple performance and video projects and provided creative support for performance works like I Am A Haunted House. Her writing often explores themes of identity, regionalism, and the uncanny.

She write novels, poems, short stories, and screenplays. Her debut novel, Marilou Is Everywhere (Riverhead, July 2019) has gathered praise from The New York Times, the New Yorker, the Washington Post, NPR, Kirkus Reviews, and Publishers Weekly, among many others, and has been selected as a Belletrist book club pick and a Penn State-Beaver Common Read. She is also the author of a collection of poems, I Live in a Hut, published in 2012 as the winner of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center's first book prize, judged by Matthea Harvey. Her poems and stories have appeared in publications such as Tin House, FENCE, jubilat, and Gulf Coast.

Sarah also teaches creative writing (of novels, in particular), via her online seminar Here Be Monsters.