Natasha Sajé

Poet, Writer, Educator

Natasha Sajé is a poet, writer, and educator of multiple identities. She has published three books of poetry: Red Under the Skin (winner of the 1993 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize), Bend, and Vivarium; a poetry handbook Windows and Doors: A Poet Reads Literary Theory; and a memoir-in-essays, Terroir: Love out of Place (a finalist for the 2021 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay).  Other awards include the Robert Winner and Alice Fay di Castagnola Awards, a Fulbright fellowship, the Campbell Corner Poetry Prize and the Utah Book Award. Her poems, reviews, and essays have appeared in many periodicals, including The Henry James Review, American Poetry Review, Copper Nickel, Kenyon Review, New Republic, Poetry, Paris Review, Gettysburg Review, Ploughshares, Rhino, Shenandoah, The Writer’s Chronicle and The New York Times.

Born in Germany to a Silesian mother and Yugoslavian father displaced by WWII, she emigrated with her family to New York City and first learned English from American television. She has lived in New York, Paris, Stuttgart, Switzerland, Slovenia, Baltimore, and Washington DC, where she fell in love with and married a Jamaican man, and with whom she ran a catering business. The couple later moved to Salt Lake City where Natasha teaches at Westminster College. She is also a longstanding faculty member in the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Writing Program. Her husband died from T-cell lymphoma in 2008, and she is now married to a woman.