*Note: for a shorter bio, visit the “Brief Biography” or “Publicity Files” page.

Sandra Beasley is the author of four poetry collections and a memoir.

She won the 2009 Barnard Women Poets Prize for I Was the Jukebox, selected by Joy Harjo (W.W. Norton, 2010). Her first collection, Theories of Falling, won the 2007 New Issues Poetry Prize judged by Marie Howe. Her poetry has appeared in such magazines as Iowa Review, Gettysburg Review, Ploughshares, Tin House, AGNI, Virginia Quarterly Review, Poetry, Copper Nickel, The Oxford American, and The Believer, as well as The Best American Poetry 2010 and multiple anthologies. In 2013, she won the Center for Book Arts Poetry Chapbook competition, judged by Harryette Mullin. Poems from that chapbook appear in Count the Waves, her third collection, published in 2015 from W. W. Norton. In fall 2018, the University of Georgia Press published an anthology edited by Beasley, Vinegar and Char: Verse from the Southern Foodways Alliance. In February 2021, W. W. Norton published her fourth collection, Made to Explode, which was named a finalist for the Library of Virginia Literary Awards (poetry category) and won a Housatonic Book Award. 

In 2011 Crown published her memoir, Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales From an Allergic Life, a cultural history of food allergy. She identifies and affiliates with those who have disability. Her nonfiction has been featured in The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Oxford American, Virginia Quarterly Review, The American Scholar, and several anthologies including A Harp in the Stars: An Anthology of Lyric Essays.

Beasley is the recipient of a 2015 Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. In spring 2018, she was the visiting poet at Wichita State University. In spring 2013, she served as the Writer-in-Residence for Lenoir-Rhyne University in Hickory, North Carolina; in fall 2013 she served as the Distinguished Writer in residence at Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa. She also served as one of three featured authors on the 2013-2014 Georgia Poetry Circuit, and as the 2011 Poet-in-Residence for Maryland’s Howard County Poetry and Literature Society. In fall 2017, she traveled to Ideogramma’s 3rd International Poetry Festival, “to the sea-girt shores of Cyprus”; in spring 2019, she traveled to Cork, Ireland, as the Munster Literature Centre’s John Montague International Poetry Fellow. Other honors for Beasley’s work include Poetry International’s C.P. Cavafy Prize, two Larry Neal Writers’ Awards, the University of Mississippi Summer Poet in Residence position, six DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities Artist Fellowships, the Friends of Literature Prize from the Poetry Foundation, and the Maureen Egen Exchange Award from Poets & Writers. She has received fellowships to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference (as a Walter E. Dakin Fellow), the Hermitage Artist Residency (as the Annette Dignam – SCF Writer in Residence), Millay Colony, Virginia Center for Creative Arts (as a Cafritz Fellow), Jentel Artist Residency, Vermont Studio Center, and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts.

Beasley has given readings across the country. Venues have included the renowned bookstores Politics & Prose, Square Books, and Books & Books, as well as academic institutions such as the Georgia Poetry Circuit’s nine colleges, the University of South Florida, Colorado State University-Pueblo, and Barnard College. She has led workshops and seminars at the 2021 Lit Youngstown Festival, the 2017 Florida Literary Arts Conference, the 2016 Sanibel Island Writers Conference, the 2014 Mississippi Writers’ Guild Conference, the 2012 Nightsun Writer’s Conference, and the 2010 Cleveland State University Imagination Conference. She has been a featured reader or panelist at the National Book Festival, the Massachusetts Poetry Festival, the Blackbird Poetry Festival, the Southern Foodways Alliance symposium, the Boston Book Festival, Miami Book Fair International, Piccolo Spoleto, the AJC-Decatur Book Festival, the Split This Rock festival, and multiple AWP Conferences.

In Spring 2024, Beasley served as the Nora Roberts Writer-in-Residence for Hood College in Frederick, Maryland. In Spring 2023, Beasley served as the McGee Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at Davidson College in Davidson, North Carolina. In Fall 2019, AY 2020-21, and AY 2021-22, she served as the Visiting Writer-in-Residence for American University. Prior to that, from 2014-2020, she worked with the University of Tampa low-residency MFA program in tandem with adjunct work at American University. Most recently she was on faculty for the University of Nebraska’s low-residency MFA program in Creative Writing, focusing on mentoring students in creative nonfiction and poetry.

Since April 2024, Sandra Beasley has worked as the Director of Communications for FARE (Food Allergy Education and Research). Beasley lives in the Southwest neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Her local literary engagements include her role editing the “Poetic Hill” feature for Capital Community News’s Hill Rag and a longtime membership with the Arts Club of Washington. She also periodically teaches workshops and seminars at the Writer’s Center and Politics & Prose. She holds an MFA in creative writing from American University and a BA in English (magna cum laude) from the University of Virginia.