Sarah Hanson
I write for the moment when you realize something in your life is no longer working—and you can’t un-know it.
That moment changes everything.
My work explores what it looks like to make decisions under pressure: leaving, grief, identity, and rebuilding a life that fits.
I’m the author of Conjuring the Hurricane, a memoir in verse about leaving an abusive marriage and starting over. The book is written to be both honest and bearable: grounded in lived experience, but shaped with enough care that readers can move through it without turning away.
I write at the intersection of lived experience and public consequence, with an emphasis on clarity, safety, and refusing simplified narratives about harm, responsibility, and resilience.
My Story
Sarah Hanson is a poet, memoirist, and the Architect of Self-Permission. Her work lives at the intersection of trauma, embodiment, generational inheritance, and the lifelong act of returning to oneself.
She writes for anyone standing at the edge of a life that no longer fits, quietly insisting: you are allowed to leave. Her voice carries the presence of a wise older sister—someone who has walked through the storm and offers what she has learned with warmth, nuance, and steadiness.
She remains apprenticed to life and the universal curriculum of loss, joy, healing, redemption, and resurrection, writing as an imperfect messenger who embraces the contradictions and complexity that real survival asks of us.
She holds a Master of Arts from the University of Chicago—the school that proudly prints “Where Fun Goes to Die” on t-shirts—and has also graduated from the school of No Fun, the academy of Childhood Trauma, and the higher education echelon of Domestic Abuse.
Hanson is a contributing editor for the anthology Shaking Off the Ashes, and her work has appeared in The HuffPost, The Literary Times, Sierra Nevada Review, Saranac Review, and Anti-Heroin Chic.
She lives in Minneapolis with her husband Jay, their three cats—Darwin, Waffles, and Princess Leia—and a codependent To-Be-Read pile.
