Natasha Sajé’s first book of poems, Red Under the Skin(Pittsburgh, 1994), was chosen from over 900 manuscripts to win the Agnes Lynch Starrett prize, and was later awarded the Towson State Prize in Literature. Her second collection of poems, Bend,was published by Tupelo Press in 2004 and awarded the Utah Book Award in Poetry. Her third book of poems, Vivarium,was published by Tupelo Press in 2014 and won the 15 Bytes Award. Her postmodern poetry handbook, Windows and Doors: A Poet Reads Literary Theory, was published by the University of Michigan press also in 2014. Terroir: Love, Out of Place, a memoir-in-essays, was published by Trinity University Press in 2020.
Sajé was born stateless in Munich, Germany, in 1955 and grew up in New York City and Northern New Jersey. She earned a B.A. from the University of Virginia, an M.A. from Johns Hopkins, and a Ph.D. from the University of Maryland at College Park, for a study titled, "'Artful Artlessness': Reading the Coquette in the Novel, 1724-1913." Her honors include the Bannister Writer-in-Residence at Sweet Briar College, the Robert Winner and the Alice Fay di Castagnola Awards from the Poetry Society of America, the 2002 Campbell Corner Poetry Prize, a Fulbright Scholarship to Slovenia, a Camargo Fellowship in France, and grants from the states of Maryland and Utah. Terroir was a PEN and Lambda finalist and won IPPY and Foreword prizes. Sajé was a Maryland poet-in-the-schools 1989-1998. Her poems, reviews, and essays appear in many periodicals, including The New York Times, The Henry James Review; Kenyon Review; New Republic; Paris Review; Poetry; Rhino; Gettysburg Review; Legacy: Journal of American Women Writers; Ploughshares; Copper Nickel; and The Writer’s Chronicle.Sajé is professor emerita of English at Westminster College in Salt Lake City and has been teaching in the low residency Vermont College MFA in Writing MFA Program since 1996.
