Sara Sams

Sara is an Assistant Professor at the University of Arizona in Tucson, AZ, where she teaches graduate and undergraduate students of creative writing. You can see her CV here. If you would rather do something fun, check out her writing exercise vault, or keep scrolling to learn about her adventures in teaching.

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Sara researches the influence discoveries in particle physics have had on poetics, a scholarly and creative endeavor that has been propelled by her students’ work in the classroom. If you would like to learn more about the (inter-)discipline, check out her annotated bibliography in progress.

She is known for letting her curiosities in science guide her writing curriculum, as well as for encouraging her students to explore their own niche obsessions. Glow worms? Punk nuns? Theories of consciousness? She wants to know more.

Sara is currently is working on new poems about medical science, childbirth, and particle physics, as well as a novel about nuclear-reactor-powered ghosts and the opioid crisis in Tennessee. She works with students in poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. If you are interested in learning from Sara, you can visit her resource vault for writing exercises, subscribe to her Substack for reflections on poetry readings in the Tucson area, or book a class visit here.

Sara’s experiences teaching abroad (in Singapore, Italy, and Spain) solidified her interest in language acquisition and teaching writing in classrooms with second-language students. She has translated poetry from Spanish and collaborated on a multilingual and interdisciplinary art about Jorge Luis Borges and Xul Solar for the Phoenix Art Museum, and she likes to learn from students who are practicing art in other mediums.

Sara also brings her experience working as a literary editor to the classroom. She has served on the editorial staff of Parnassus: Poetry in Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Identity Theory Magazine, and has directly supported student editors as a faculty mentor for The Superstition Review.