Sarah Wetzel

My website is www.sarahwetzel.com

I am a poet, essayist, engineer, and I am the author of The Davids Inside David, just released from Terrapin Books. This book of poems explores issues of authenticity and art, love and love's disintegration. I hope you'll check it out. I am also the author of River Electric with Light, which won the AROHO Poetry Publication Prize and was published by Red Hen Press in 2015, and Bathsheba Transatlantic, which won the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry and was published by Anhinga Press in 2010.

A PhD student in Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York, I also, when possible, teach creative writing at The American University of Rome, Italy. Not surprisingly, I spend a lot of time on planes.

I have an engineering degree from Georgia Tech and a MBA from UC, Berkeley. In 2004, I moved to live in Tel Aviv. Perhaps it was the shock of living in a different culture and language that sent me back to poetry. Granted poetry was always a passion but for the past six years it has been the primary. If as Richard Hugo says, "Writing is a slow accumulative way of accepting one's life as valid..." for me, writing was a means of accepting other lives as valid. I won't say that poetry saved my life, but it definitely saved my sanity. Making a fuller commitment, and while still living almost full time in Tel Aviv, I went back and forth to the US to study and in 2009 completed a MFA in Creative Writing from Bennington College.

Currently, my home base is Manhattan though still consider Tel Aviv and Rome rooms of my house. We are all products of our experiences and of our loves. So too is my poetry.