Sarah Valentine
AUTHOR

Sarah Valentine

Politics & Social Sciences
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Sarah Valentine always wanted to be a writer. She began writing poetry in high school in Western Pennsylvania, where she also discovered Russian literature. She continued writing and translating poetry while her studies in Russian literature took her all over the world, including on a spectacular two-week journey on the Trans-Siberian railroad from Moscow to Beijing. After obtaining her Ph.D. in 2007 she attended a Callaloo summer writing workshop for African American writers and realized she needed to write about something much closer to home: her struggle with racial identity and the troubling family secrets that surrounded it. This led to her award-winning essay, "When I Was White," which was anthologized in Waveform: 21st-Century Essays by Women, and her memoir by the same title. Sarah has received numerous awards for her writing and scholarship, most notably a prestigious Lannan Foundation Writer's Fellowship in 2013. She has taught literature and creative writing at Princeton, University of California-Los Angeles, University of California-Riverside, and Northwestern University. Sarah enjoys writing about topics related to black and mixed-race identity, especially in various historical settings. She loves murder mysteries, ghost stories, fairytales, folklore, and myth (and of course, Russian literature) - anything that gives us a glimpse into another world. Sarah is endlessly curious, loves to travel, and believes the world is full of surprising, wonderful things to be discovered.
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