About the Instructor/Moderator

Sandra Beasley’s newest book is Made to Explode, which won the 2022 Housatonic Book Award for poetry. Her disability memoir, Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life, a cultural history of food allergy, received wide media coverage and was a finalist for a Goodreads Choice Award in 2011. She has published three other poetry collections (including winners of the Barnard Women Poets Prize and the New Issues Poetry Prize) and edited Vinegar and Char: Verse from the Southern Foodways Alliance. Newspapers and magazines that have featured her work include the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Psychology Today, The Nation, and more.

Honors for Beasley’s work include a 2015 NEA Artist Fellowship and six DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities Artist Fellowships. She has held visiting writer professorships at Davidson College, University College Cork, American University, Wichita State University, Cornell College, Lenoir-Rhyne University, and the University of Mississippi. Beasley has also taught with low-residency MFA programs at Hood College, the University of Nebraska Omaha, and the University of Tampa. Beasley is the poetry editor for Blair, a literary press based in Durham, North Carolina, and Gravy, the quarterly journal of the Southern Foodways Alliance. She lives in Southwest Washington, DC.