“I’m worried I’m overwhelming you. And also being confusing.”
“If this is what I have to be guilty about, how do I claim that? How do I climb out of that?… I’m trying to make shame into something that’s not shameful. To get away with something, by writing it down and sharing it.”
Sarah Venart was born in Calgary, Alberta in 1968. She moved to New Brunswick with her family at the age of four, spending her childhood and teenage years on a sheep farm near the village of Elgin. She has published two books of poetry: Woodshedding (2007) and I am The Big Heart (2020).
Sarah has an MA in Creative Writing and Literature (Concordia) and two B.A.s in Creative Writing and Canadian Studies.
She has received funding from the Conseil des Arts du Québec Grants for Professional Writers, Canada Council Professional Writers’ Grants, and the New Brunswick Arts Council. She has been awarded fellowships from the Banff Centre for the Arts twice, as well as from Art Omi, Hawthornden Castle, the Millay Colony, the Beckett Foundation of Denmark, and the Baltic Centre for Writers and Translators in Sweden. She’s participated in Marge Piercy’s Intensive Poetry Workshop and Dorothea Lasky’s Witch Craft: A Happening. She has also collaborated with Germany poet Hendrik Rost on a poetry translation exchange.
Other awards include the CBC/Quebec Writers’ Federation Short Story Award, This Magazine’s Great Canadian Literary Hunt, SubTerrain Last Poems Contest, and the BP Nichol Poetry Award. Her work has been shortlisted for the Canadian Literary Awards, the Robertson Davies/Chapters First Novel Award, the Kalamalka New Writers’ Competition, Glimmer Train’s Short Story Award, and the Re-lit Award.
Sarah has participated in readings and festivals in Canada, the US, and in Europe. Her work has been published in Malahat Review, The Moth, So to Speak Journal, Numero Cinq, Concrete and River, The Fiddlehead, This Magazine, Maisonneuve, Books in Canada, and on CBC Radio.
— Selected Interviews —