Sarah Fletcher

Sarah Fletcher is an American-British writer. Her debut collection PLUS ULTRA was published by Cheerio Publishing in 2023. Her poetry has appeared in The Poetry Review, The White Review, Poetry London, and other publications. She has written articles for The New Statesman, The Washington Post, and The Spectator. She is completing an AHRC-funded PhD at Aberystwyth University on chronic pain and language, a project which was the recipient of a Collaborative Doctoral Award for interdisciplinary research. She has published fiction in The London Magazine and is currently editing her novel Flee This Sad Hotel.

She is interested in medicine, psychiatry, gender, pop culture, pain, poetry, and literary history.

Sarah always is open to new opportunities, collaborations, and commissions.

Books

• PLUS ULTRA — Cheerio Publishing, 2023
• Caviar — Out-Spoken Press, 2022
• Typhoid August — Poetry Business, 2017
• Kissing Angles — Dead Ink Books, 2015

Praise For Sarah's Writing and Teaching

“By turns evocative of English landscape paintings and frantic late-night conversations, Sarah Fletcher’s poems are highly mobile, troubled, troubling, rich and fraught.”

— Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick

“PLUS ULTRA is an alarming, accomplished and brilliant first collection. Fletcher’s ambition, formal invention, erudition and technical precision offer a compelling scaffold for poems that fizz and flit between vulnerability, wit and a brutal willingness to confront the world, and others, with a dark honesty that is frequently refreshing and, occasionally, genuinely menacing.”

— Ahren Warner

“PLUS ULTRA is a wild, exciting, lyrical book, free-associative and narrative at the same time … Fletcher is a poet of the future, and lucky for us, she’s arrived just in time.”

— Matthew Dickman

“Sarah is an excellent and generous teacher. I thoroughly enjoyed the course and a lot of the activities had new and innovative prompts I hadn't explored before.”

— Poetry School “Writing Pain” participant

“My daughter loved working with Sarah. She is patient, intelligent and inspiring. My daughter now loves English and has even asked for more homework!”

— 11+ tutoring client

Selected Poetry

• “Madrid Chorus,” The London Magazine — link
• “Tender,” The New Statesman — link
• “A Slap In The Face… of Nature,” Stillpoint — link
• “Two Poems,” Hotel — link
• “Two Poems,” The London Magazine — link
• “Two Poems,” The White Review — link

Selected Articles

• “Life, Friends, is Boring: On John Berryman, Doomscrolling, and Anxiety,” The Still Point London — link
• “The Magic Has Gone Out of Flirting,” The Washington Post — link
• “How Blue Hair Stopped Being Cool,” The New Statesman — link
• “Lily Phillips Is A Rorschach Test,” The Critic — link
• “4B and the Futility of Heteropessimism,” The Critic — link
• “In Defence of Sex Scenes in Movies,” The Critic — link
• “On Taylor Swift and the Unromantic Truth about Tortured Poets,” The Critic — link

She also writes occasionally on Substack and tweets.

Academics & Research

Sarah Fletcher is in the final year of a PhD at Aberystwyth University titled Writing Pain, an interdisciplinary research project examining language, metaphor, and chronic pain. The doctorate is conducted in collaboration with the Powys Pain and Fatigue Management Clinic and the University of Reading, and is supervised by Jacqueline Yallop.

In November 2024, she delivered a paper titled “Poetry as an Epistemic Tool” at All Souls College, Oxford, as part of the Poetry and Philosophy conference. The paper explored poetry as a mode of knowledge-production rather than expression.

Her essay “In Defence of Inspiration”, originally presented at Aberystwyth University, was later published in Wild Court, an international poetry journal based in King’s College London’s English Department.

Earlier academic papers include “Who Will Forgive Me for the Things I Do? Anne Sexton’s Formal Influence on Sylvia Plath”, presented at the Sylvia Plath: Letters, Words and Fragments conference at Ulster University in 2017, and “What Does It Mean for Poetry to Engage in the Real World?”, delivered at the Vox Conference at the University of Kent in 2014.

Teaching

Sarah Fletcher has over a decade of teaching experience. She has taught undergraduates at Aberystwyth University and the University of Bath, and has organised writing workshops with The Poetry School, The Steiner House, the Writing Squad, and more. She particularly enjoys working with children and young people, and has extensive experience designing engaging, supportive learning environments for younger students. She current hosts writing and art workshops in schools and holds a registered DBS. She has also designed and plans to deliver a six-part course on language and pain management based on her academic research.