Sasha West was born and raised in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her second book, How to Abandon Ship (Four Way Books, 2024), was a Kingsley Tufts Finalist, and received the Texas Institute of Letters Burdine C. Johnson Best Book of Poetry Award, and the Writers’ League of Texas Poetry Book Award.

Her first book, Failure and I Bury the Body (Harper Perennial, 2013), won the National Poetry Series and the Texas Institute of Letters First Book of Poetry Award. It was also selected as one of ten best debut books by Victoria Chang for Poets & Writers. 

She collaborates on multi-media, eco-arts exhibitions with visual artist Hollis Hammonds as the collaborative Hammonds + West. Their collaborations have been featured at Texas A&M University’s Wright Gallery, the Austin Public Library Central Gallery space, the San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts, the College of the Mainland, ArtPrize2023 in Michigan, and the Columbus College of Art and Design, Houston’s Art League, and The Grace Museum in Abilene, TX.

Her work has been collected in the anthologies The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood,Out of Time: Poetry from the Climate Emergency, Still Life with Poem: 100 Natures Mortes in Verse, Penned: Zoo Poems, and others. Individual poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review Online, Ecotone, The Georgia Review, Agni, American Poet, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere.

Her awards include a Fellowship to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, a Houston Arts Alliance grant, multiple Pushcart nominations, and Inprint’s Verlaine Prize. In the early 2000s, she served as lead editor for and, later, board president of Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts. 

Currently, she is a Professor of Creative Writing at St. Edward’s University, where she received the Distinguished Teaching Award and the Hudspeth Innovative Teaching Award. She lives in Austin, TX, with her husband and kid.  

Contact at: swest1 (at) stedwards.edu