Sarah Shotland
Sarah Shotland is the author of the novel Junkette, and a playwright whose work has been performed in professional theaters around the world.
In 2009, she co-founded Words Without Walls, which brought creative writing classes to jails, prisons, and drug treatment centers in Pittsburgh until 2022. Her work has been funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Heinz Endowments, The Pittsburgh Foundation, Staunton Family Farm Foundation, and Opportunity Fund.
Sarah’s most recent work, Abolition is Everything, was published by Antenna Press. Abolition is Everything is a participatory, nonfiction project that combines research, reflection, and audience action & was created during her time as the 2021 Artist-in-residence at Antenna’s Paper Machine residency in New Orleans.
Other residencies include the SFAI Equal Justice Fellowship, and the Denver Lighthouse Fort Lyon Writer-in-Residence. In 2024, Sarah was awarded a Madeline L’Engle Research Fellowship from Smith College, where she will use the special collections archives in researching her next novel.
She’s currently working on a collection of essays about teaching creative writing in jails and prisons. Her essays about the subject have appeared or are forthcoming in The Iowa Review, Creative Nonfiction, Baltimore Review, and North American Review. Sarah regularly speaks and writes about art as a tool for prison abolition. You can listen to a super-quick, 140 second talk here.
With Sheryl St. Germain, she coedited the literary anthology Words without Walls: Writers on Addiction, Violence & Incarceration, published by Trinity University Press in spring of 2015.
Her most recent play, Cereus Moonlight, was commissioned by miR Theater. After opening on the Space Coast of Florida, it played at the 25th annual Rhino Fest in Chicago. Other work for the stage has been performed in theaters in Dallas, Austin, New Orleans, and Chicago, and internationally in Spain and China. She’s also written commissioned work for Corningworks Dance and Sonarcheology Pittsburgh.
Sarah is represented by Danielle Chiotti at Upstart Crow Literary.