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Sara Mae

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Sara Mae
Photo:
Sam Cush

Sara Mae is a genderqueer writer raised on the Chesapeake Bay. They are a 2026 fiction alum and 2022 poetry alum of the McCormack Writing Center Workshops (FKA Tin House), and a 2025 SAFTA Artist-in-Residence. A finalist for the Loraine Williams Poetry Prize, their work has been published in the Georgia Review, Fairytale Review, the POETRY, The Offing, and elsewhere. Their second chapbook, Phantasmagossip, won the Vinyl45 chapbook competition and was published with YesYes Books in 2025. They write and release music as The Noisy. Sara Mae received their MFA from UT Knoxville. They currently live in Philly.

Phantasmagossip by Sara Mae is a packed funeral. The poems mourn shouting over one another to tell a story, squeezing hands of strangers and loved ones, picking at the many homemade mac n cheeses.

"Like its title, Sara Mae’s Phantasmagossip is a delicious morsel of a chapbook, a short but propulsive read that sets me squarely in the glittering liminal spaces of carnivals and dreams. In all these lovely turns of language, in all these uncanny moments of whimsy and gravity, Sara Mae’s precise language guides me through the funhouses of desire, trauma, memory, and the lingering romance between past, present, and future. Sara Mae is a poet who powerfully embodies what it means to take words, phrases, images, and portmanteaus and make them sing. This is a gorgeous book, filled with the language that reminds us of poetry’s expansive power, not simply as something to be rhymed and recited, but as the sacred forge in which language is cast anew and made one’s own.”
—Destiny O. Birdsong, author of Negotiations and Nobody's Magic

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