Sarah Leavens

  • Teaching Associate Professor
  • Assistant Director of Public & Professional Writing Program

Sarah's Affiliations: CEAT, Internships, Writer's Cafe

Sarah Leavens teaches public and professional writing at the University of Pittsburgh, including the English Department Internship course, Grant Writing, Writing for Fundraising and Development, and Professional Uses of Social Media. A consultant in the Writing Center, she co-coordinates the Writers' Café and works with the social media committee. In the English Department, she is a member of the Undergraduate Placement/Internship committee and the Assessment Committee and is the faculty advisor for the student organization Association of Writers.

With a background in nonprofit outreach, community-integrated projects, and nontraditional classroom teaching, as well as visual art, she also works as a teaching artist specializing in creative writing, drawing, painting, and book arts, and intersections thereof. She participates in PA Arts in Education programming including Poetry Out Loud. Recent projects include creative writing for women in recovery and poetry workshops tailored for seniors with Alzheimer's/dementia. In 2019 she was invited to speak on the "Writing as Social Engagement" panel at the Barrelhouse Conversations and Connections conference.

Leavens received an MFA in poetry and nonfiction, with specializations in travel writing and pedagogy, from Chatham University in 2012, and she was the 2012-2013 Out of the Forge Writer-in-Residence in Braddock, PA. Her poetry has appeared in LUNCH, The Diverse Arts Press, Corium, and So to Speak, among other places, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.