Sarah Messer has received fellowships and grants from the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the NEA, and the Mellon Foundation. In 2008-2009 she was a fellow in poetry at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (Bunting) at Harvard. She is the author of a hybrid history/memoir, Red House (Viking), and a poetry book, Bandit Letters (New Issues). Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, and Ploughshares, among others. She teaches at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, and runs One Pause Poetry, a reading series in Ann Arbor, Michigan.