Teachers & Writers Collaborative

Sarah Dohrmann

Sarah has been a T&W writer-in-residence since 2001. She teaches poetry and prose writing to all ages of New York City students in both general and special education. Sarah asks her students to mine their lived experiences with honesty and humility, while encouraging them to extend their imaginations fully so as to encounter themselves and their characters with compassion. She uses contemporary multicultural literature as models of fine, meaningful writing. Sarah has also taught creative writing in Special Programs at Sarah Lawrence College since 2003.

With photographer Tiana Markova-Gold, Sarah won the 2010 Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize from the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University for their reportage, “If You Smoke Cigarettes in Public, You Are a Prostitute: Women and Prostitution in Morocco.” The award is given to encourage collaboration in documentary work in the tradition of acclaimed American photographer Dorothea Lange and writer and social scientist Paul Taylor. Sarah received a 2010 Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grant to travel to Iowa to research and continue writing her narrative nonfiction book about her mother’s death in 1978. She was a finalist for the 2010 Iowa Award in Fiction and the 2010 Iowa Award in Nonfiction. Also in 2010, she was a Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA) Writing Fellow. In 2009, Sarah won a New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Award in Nonfiction Literature, and for 15 months in 2007–2008, she lived in Morocco as a Fulbright Fellow of the Arts. In 2006, Sarah’s essay “Teenage Boy Gunned Down,” which addresses the sudden death of one of her students as well as race in the classroom, was selected as a finalist for T&W’s Bechtel Prize.

Sarah completed her masters in fine arts in fiction from Sarah Lawrence College in 2004, where in addition to graduate writing work, she conducted an in-depth study of creative writing as it relates to educating emotionally disabled children in New York City schools.

Born and raised in Iowa, Sarah has also lived in Washington, DC, and Los Angeles. She is fluent in French and speaks conversational Arabic. She’s been a New Yorker now for 11 years; she lives in Brooklyn.