http://sarabluemead.com/home-pursuit daily 1.0 2025-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/57e1bcdfd2b85735aafdcf1c/8c19bba2-2176-4204-af49-2ff5be282d86/P1300033.JPG Home - Sara Bluemead is a poet, essayist, librettist, & storyteller. She was born in Southern California, raised in Tornado Country, and came of age amidst the back roads and abandoned factories of western New Jersey. Sara is the author of Via Combusta, winner of the 2021 New American Poetry Prize, selected by Quan Barry and published by New American Press in November 2022. Her debut work of short fiction, “The Place,” won the Iron Horse Long Story award, and she’s the most recent winner of the Third Coast poetry prize. Her writing has appeared in Missouri Review, Best Microfiction 2023, New Ohio Review, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. She has a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from University of Southern California, and is currently an ACLS Leading Edge postdoctoral fellow at the Skid Row History Museum & Archive in Los Angeles. She lives in Long Beach, next to a well-worn stretch of the Pacific Ocean. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/57e1bcdfd2b85735aafdcf1c/e6a06371-2dd2-4dfe-8233-ccbb0feb9471/cover.jpg Home - Praise for Via Combusta "Every poem in Sara Fetherolf 's incantatory debut collection Via Combusta is a keeper," says Barry. "Here is a hard-won wisdom, tempered by both pain and truth, and distilled from a life spent 'jumping from cage to cage' in search of home. 'I left day-old loaves at crossroads on the new moon, praying hard for an out, an ending, for uncross me uncross me uncross me-' Ultimately the magic Fetherolf unearths is the simple everyday resilience of the human soul, 'to not flinch when [the monster] looks you in the eye.' Via Combusta charms as it testifies." —Quan Barry, author of author of Water Puppets and Asylum "Be mouth, the speaker of Sara Fetherolf's haunting Via Combusta commands: talk back, tell how. By turns incantatory and plainspoken, these poems sing, pray, curse, chant, praise, petition, cast spells and conjure an unsettling world in which danger is never far off, where hunting guns hum in a locked closet and Remember is the name of a monster. This is a remarkable debut collection in which survival is hard won-and always conditional." - Donna Masini, author of 4:30 Movie