Teachers & Writers Collaborative

Sarah Dohrmann

Sarah Dohrmann has been a T&W artist-in-residence since 2001. While she has taught poetry and prose to all ages of New York City children in both general and special education, she currently works primarily with general ed high school students. Sarah asks teenagers to write honestly and with humility about their own lives, often using contemporary multicultural literature as models of fine, meaningful writing.

In 2006, Sarah Dohrmann’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. Also in 2006, Sarah was a Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation Fellow at The Millay Colony for the Arts, where she worked on her novel. In 2004 she earned her MFA in fiction at Sarah Lawrence College, where she also conducted an in-depth study of creative writing as it relates to emotionally disturbed children in New York City schools. Sarah attended the Summer Literary Seminars in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 2004, and she was a 2003 finalist for the Iowa Award in Fiction. In addition to teaching artist work with Teachers & Writers Collaborative, Sarah is also a freelance journalist and an annual faculty member at the High School Summer Writers Seminar at Sarah Lawrence College. Diaries of her teaching experiences have appeared in Teachers & Writers magazine.

Born and raised in Iowa, Sarah has also lived in Washington, DC, and Los Angeles, California. She is currently a creative writing Fulbright Fellow in Morocco.