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 more about her pedagogy.
particle poetics
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 particularly inspired by the poet-scholar Amy Catanzano (Wake Forest University), who founded the Entanglement Networks and has catalyzed creative and scholarly work in the interdisciplinary field.
pedagogy
In the classroom, Sara lets her curiosities in science guide writing curriculum. She encourages her students to explore their own niche obsessions, too: Glow worms? Punk nuns? Theories of consciousness? She wants to know more.
Her teaching is informed by her current creative projects, a marriage that has historically offered her opportunities for self-reflection and growth. Presently, she’s working on projects in three genres: new poems about medical science, childbirth, and particle physics; a novel about nuclear-reactor-powered ghosts and the opioid crisis in Tennessee; and an essay about her relationship with Sh!t Theatre’s performance of wry feminism. She works with students in poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction, leaning on her experience troubling through the genres herself.
Her graduate coursework is in poetry, however, and Sara spends a lot of her teaching energy hoping to demystify the genre. If you’re preparing to discuss poetry for the first time, or the first time in a while, you might find this handout a useful primer.
If you are interested in learning more 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. Below is an excerpt from a workshop Sara lead for the Tucson Poetry Festival last year (Particle Poetics: A Workshop Collider).
multilingual, inter-modal
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 artwork for the Phoenix Art Museum; similarly, she likes to learn from students who are practicing art in other mediums, and she welcomes multimodal and multlingual work in the classroom.
editorial
Sara brings has served on the editorial staff of Parnassus: Poetry in Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review (issue #51 is an issue she is still especially proud of), Waxwing Magazine, and Identity Theory Magazine, and she brings her experience working as a literary editor to the classroom.
She more directly supported student editors as a faculty mentor for The Superstition Review at Arizona State University, a beautiful project which lost its institutional support in 2023. She is invested in student-run literary arts and recommends you check out the Sonoran Review, edited by graduate students at the University of Arizona.
Sara Sams 