sarah minor
Sarah Minor is a writer and interdisciplinary artist and the author of Slim Confessions: The Universe as a Spider or Spit, winner of the Noemi Press Book Award for Prose (2021), Bright Archive, a collection of visual essays (Rescue Press, 2020), and the chapbook The Persistence of The Bonyleg: Annotated, selected by Joseph Harrington (Essay Press, 2016).
Minor is the recipient of a Research Fellowship to Iceland from the American Scandinavian Foundation, a 2019 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, and her essay "Something Clear" was awarded the 2018 Barthelme Prize in Short Prose. Minor has held fellowships to the Vermont Studio Center and the Hambidge Center for Creative Arts and was the 2018 Peter Taylor Fellow at the Kenyon Writer's Workshop.
Minor serves as curator of the visual essay series at Essay Daily and as Video Editor at TriQuarterly Review. She holds a PhD in Creative Nonfiction from Ohio University and an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of Arizona and currently teaches in the University of Iowa's Nonfiction Writing Program
Photo credit: Maria Rouzzo
Sarracenia minor is the hooded pitcherplant; a rhizomatous, perennial, carnivorous plant in the genus Sarracenia. There are many Sarah Minors out in cyberspace, and this weird plant alias was once a tool to help specify.
Connect: sceniaminor [at] gmail [dot] com
Winner of the 2020 Big Other Award in Nonfiction
Finalist for CLMP's 2020 Firecracker Award in Creative Nonfiction
Finalist for the 2020 Johnson Award in Nonfiction
Named one of Entropy's Best Nonfiction Books of 2020-2021
"In Sarah Minor’s adventurous and investigatory debut collection of essays, Bright Archive, place and space are inextricably linked through an imaginative exploration of the patterns, shapes, and systems that alternately organize and disrupt our ordinary intimacies. From a recollection of a summer spent working in an Italian commune to the business of mollusks in Minor’s grandparent’s hometown in Iowa; from the history of the mapping of the Mississippi River to the mythologies of the image of “the lean;” from studies of soffits and hidden spaces to the freedom found at the top of an island birch tree, these essays reach beyond the classically confined trajectories of literary nonfiction. Using elements of memoir, concrete poetry, archival research, interview, performance, and design in a radiant kaleidoscope of storytelling, the essays in Bright Archive delight in challenging the reader’s habits of interaction with the page and its possibilities."
—Rescue Press
"Sarah Minor’s sense of what an essay is, what it can look like, and what it can contain is way beyond what almost anyone else is even attempting. Open to any page in this book and you’re going to encounter something new. Every essay’s an invention, a new possession, and I for one am down with being possessed if the spirit that possesses me is like Minor’s, comprised of wonder, wit, and intelligence. Prepare to read differently: Bright Archive is a miracle."
—Ander Monson, I Will Take the Answer
"In Bright Archive, Sarah Minor’s inventive, surprising, and moving collection of visual essays, short prose pieces nestle in the soffits of an old family home, sentences wind themselves into knots, passages draft alongside the banks of the Mississippi River—as a way of interrogating the relationships between and among literal, figurative, and symbolic spaces. Minor is preoccupied with interiors and exteriors, bodies and imaginations, myths and secrets, with how places are entered and marked by their inhabitants, and how people, too are shaped. “All I’m saying is that belief might design a body and not always the other way around. All I’m saying is that a living container could bear signs of the life it contains.” In this thrilling debut, Minor guides us deftly through the underground tunnels of a new age commune, to the branches of a birch tree to build a nest. This collection traverses continents and moves through time, insistent in its curiosity and dazzling in its innovation."
—Mary-Kim Arnold, The Fish & The Dove
"My favorite books are somehow architectural, and I’ve never encountered one built quite like this. Minor’s prose has underground temples, a shadow self, it becomes the thing it describes. Prose morphing into pearls, rivers down the page, a diagram directs the eye, cupping an essay’s threads. This is a book that, through both story and design, reminds us what wonder feels like."
—Aisha Sabatini Sloan, Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit
"Minor is a formidable essayist whose contributions to nonfiction are not limited to formal innovation. Bright Archive also interrogates questions of sexuality, refuge, and familial legacy. As the title implies, the essays catalog the unseen: what one might find hidden beneath a rushing river, or tucked away in kitchen cupboards, or stuffed down a laundry chute . . . Her essays stress what Sigmund Freud, in 1919, called the 'unheimlich,' or the uncanny—that which at first appears to be familiar but, upon closer inspection, resembles something unknown and strange."
—Zoë Bossiere for The Believer
"A combination of concrete poetry, interviews, memoir, and historical research, Minor's experimental nonfiction collection is interactive architecture with directional force. Each essay demands the reader physically change perspectives to enter figurative and literal interstices that examine how people and places are shaped by one another."
—Tree Abraham for Electric Literature
"Minor’s book does what good writing should do – look at familiar things with new eyes. What do we collect? What is collected? What spaces are in the light? What is in the shadows? I could have read this book forever."
—Charles Ellenbogen
"This is one of the best books I've ever read. Period. Nothing has stretched my comprehension further, delighted me more, captured my imagination entirely..."
—Tara Lynn Masih for Goodreads
