24PearlStreet Workshops

We often regard the author’s voice as having an inherent, unchangeable quality. Many writers have invoked the analogy comparing one’s voice to a fingerprint. But one person’s “fingerprint” is another person’s rut, and no author should feel trapped in his or her voice.
Biography
Sandra Beasley is the author of four poetry collections—Made to Explode, Count the Waves, I Was the Jukebox, which won the 2009 Barnard Women Poets Prize, and Theories of Falling—as well as Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life, a disability memoir and cultural history of food allergies. She served as the editor for Vinegar and Char: Verse from the Southern Foodways Alliance. Honors for her work include the 2019 Munster Literature Centre’s John Montague International Poetry Fellowship, a 2015 NEA fellowship, and five DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities fellowships. She lives in Washington, D.C.