It is hard to believe that exactly one year ago, I was sending out submission after submission of my first book manuscript, hoping for the right publisher. Despite having been lucky enough to receive a few finalist nods from a few nice competitions, the book was not landing.

I wasn’t sure quite what to do next.

Fast forward to now: I found a wonderful publisher in Saint Julian Press, my debut full-length collection, The Grief Committee Minutes, is now out in the world and I’ve experienced an incredible outpouring of support from so many people. Up until last spring, I was receiving acceptance notices from a few journals for poems I had been unable to place, so my acknowledgements page was growing. I have an incredibly beautiful book, and I am deeply grateful to all who have had a part in this key milestone in my life.

Some other highlights of 2024:

• Two Pushcart nominations! On my 36th attempt over 10 years —  yep, you read that right, 10 years! — a poem of mine titled “Friesian Story” was accepted by Radar Poetry.  I didn’t publish many poems this year, and this was an unusual poem for me in that it was inspired by an equine patient of UF’s Large Animal Hospital that I wrote a news story about. When I posted about my excitement on Facebook, the editor of the University of Florida alumni association magazine saw the post, contacted me and asked if she could do a story about this for her magazine. I certainly wasn’t expecting that! On top of this, I learned in November that Radar’s editors had nominated “Friesian Story” for a Pushcart Prize. Can we just go ahead and name “Friesian Story” my poem of the year?
• Another poem of mine, “Tahane Recalls His Escape,” about a captive gray wolf that escaped his confines during Hurricane Michael, was also nominated for a Pushcart by the editors at Sweet Literary Journal.
• A second manuscript emerges! Incredibly, I cobbled together a new collection, Bloodstream, with the help of the wonderful poet, William Woolfitt. The work happened as I was finalizing The Grief Committee Minutes and had reached out to Will for some of his thoughts on poetry and publishing. Will got what he calls “a crazy idea,” having to do with curating several poems from my previous two chapbooks, reworking some of them and adding those to new or previously unpublished work where we found overlapping themes, and where these poems spoke to each other the way one hopes they will when envisioning a meaningful collection. We ended up working intensely on this manuscript over a period of several months over the summer and early fall. I cannot thank Will enough for his “crazy ideas” and constant support with editing, ordering, really everything.
• Poems in Body Literature, Cider Press Review, and Saint Katherine Review, as well as Radar and Sweet. Not lots of poems this year, but each publication was gratifying, and a few of the publications were from my new manuscript.

I sometimes ask myself: OK, Sarah … why is it that you mark your years and successes in poetry, but you don’t talk much about the other things that constitute your life? This is a fair point.

I do have a job I love, which occupies much of my bandwidth during the work week and often beyond, and that work I do at the University of Florida College of Veterinary Medicine certainly has milestones associated with it. Some years, there may be a successful marketing campaign, or good news on the college rankings, or some really interesting news stories I’ve been able to share.

Some years, there may be travel highlights — special trips or visits with family and friends. But it is true that my work in the poetry realm sustains me in a unique way, and in a way that often feels uniquely important. It’s fair to say it anchors me, although a self can’t really be anchored. Poetry provides me with a spiritual dimension because it affords a medium for witnessing to the world around me; through language and through writing, to leave something behind for…for whom? Friends, family, others who might survive me? Anyone intrigued by the subject matter that constitutes my themes?

All I know is that I am an extremely lucky human, and that as long as I am able, I intend to pursue the craft of writing and whatever it has yet to teach me.