Sara Henning : part one

Sara Henning is the author of Burn (Southern Illinois University Press, 2023), Terra Incognita (Ohio University Press, 2022), and View from True North (Southern Illinois University Press, 2018). She was awarded the 2015 Crazyhorse Lynda Hull Memorial Poetry Prize, the 2019 Poetry Society of America's George Bogin Memorial Award, First Prize in the 2020 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award (Passaic County Community College), and a Tennessee Williams Scholarship in poetry to the 2019 Sewanee Writers' Conference. Her work has appeared in journals such as Quarterly West, Crab Orchard Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Southern Humanities Review, Witness, Meridian, and the Cincinnati Review. She is an assistant professor of English at Marshall University.

What are you working on? 

I am currently working on a new collection of poems, Yellow, an ekphrastic collection which addresses Vincent Van Gogh's life and art produced during his time at the Saint-Paul Asylum in Saint-Rémy, then in Auvers, where he committed suicide. During this time, he produced some of his most famous paintings—The Olive Trees (1889), Irises (1889), and The Starry Night (1889). I have held a flame for Van Gogh ever since I was a child, specifically his relationship with the aesthetics of color. Through the use of color, van Gogh often rendered the physical world around him into a living anthology of emotion, and as such, van Gogh’s relationship between art and mental illness is of great interest to me. While exploring Van Gogh’s work, I am concurrently exploring my mother’s relationship with mental illness, specifically bipolar disorder.