Celebrating the writing and vision of Dr. Sarah Einstein
Dr. Sarah Einstein is an essayist, creates memoirs, and writes literary nonfiction. She was born and raised in Huntington, West Virginia with a loving and hardworking family.
When she was a young child in the Sixties, her grandfather sent her and her brother to elocution lessons in order for them to not have Appalachian accents, but she regrets this happening.
After graduation, she moved to Chattanooga to become a teacher and she was my teacher during my time at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.
According to her profile on UTC’s website, “she’s interested in creative writing: nonfiction, fiction, digital rhetoric’s, humanities disability studies, and writing across media publishing studies.” Yep, she likes to write.
She teaches Creative Writing: Nonfiction and says she is grateful to have the position to influence her students’ writing careers as she believes each of her students has great potential to benefit from the craft.
Her passion for teaching comes from knowing she will likely not be the person writing great literature, and instead wants to teach students who may be able to accomplish more.
Einstein started writing in her twenties as well as attending workshops. She graduated with a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing degree from West Virginia University (go Mountaineers!) and went on to get a PhD in Creative Nonfiction from Ohio University.
“I think there is great value in seeing the world through someone else’s eyes, and that reading creative nonfiction—particularly personal narrative—is as close as we can come to doing that. I’ve seen some things most people haven’t, and so I write about those things in the hope of expanding my readers’ realm of experience,” Einstein says.
She has written nonfiction works such as “Mot: A Memoir” and “Remnants of Passion”. She has quite a bit of essays published and a couple short stories, along with a literary magazine where her writers are “committed to elevating marginalized voices and to literature that explores the experiences of the working class.”
“Mot: A Memoir” won the prestigious Pushcart Prize, a literary prize that honors poetry, essays, short fiction, and literary work. It’s published by the Pushcart Press who has been giving this award out for over 40 years.
Outside of teaching, Dr. Einstein describes herself as a “big nerd”. Her hobbies include playing video games, cooking, binge-watching Netflix, and occasionally attending a board game night.
A fun fact about her is that when she was a college student in West Virginia, she actually lived in a tipi on a commune. “I probably seem exactly like the sort of person who used to live in a tipi on a commune,” she notes in her teacher profile on UTC’s website. I doubt anyone who has met her would disagree.
All told, she’s an all-around awesome person to hang around with. Even though I personally didn’t find Creative Writing: Nonfiction to be my niche, she made the classroom more interesting and got all the students involved.
She loves teaching and that’s something students can clearly see from being part of her classroom. Not to mention, the stories about her life that she tells in class are beyond interesting.