Sarah piatt biography

Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt was an American poet.
Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt was an American poet.
Sarah Morgan Bryan was born to a slave-holding family in 1836 and lived a somewhat itinerant childhood after the death of her mother.

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In the late 1850s, when a young Sarah Morgan Bryan began to publish her poems in magazines and journals (her first collection, A Woman’s Poems, appeared in 1871 under her married name Sarah Piatt), poetry was one of America’s most popular literary forms. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, James Russell Lowell, and their fellow Fireside Poets were perennial best-sellers, and the brash youngster Walt Whitman had made his own controversial splash with the first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855). Piatt’s poems and collections, which tended to focus on such universal human subjects as courtship and romance, marriage and family, and children, would continue that popular literary legacy well into the 1890s.

In the early 21st century, however, few Americans read poetry for pleasure, and fewer still read Sarah Piatt. For a time her works were dismissed as sentimental and superficial, part of a wide swath of 19th century women’s writing deemed too slight or insignificant to be remembered (even in scholarly works or college classrooms). While at least some scholars hav

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"Discovering Sarah": An interview with Elizabeth Renker about her new podcast

American poet Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt (1836-1919) enjoyed a prolific career during her lifetime, widely acclaimed from the 1850s—when she was still a teenager—through the turn of the 20th century. She fell from view around the time of her death. In the 1990s, scholars rediscovered her work, quickly identifying her as a great woman poet akin to Emily Dickinson. Professor Elizabeth Renker has been focused on the Piatt recovery for 20 years and is now writing Piatt’s first biography. In summer 2022, she released season one of the podcast “Discovering Sarah: America’s Lost Great Writer.” We spoke with her about her Piatt projects.

WhydidyouchoosethepodcastformattoshareSarahMorganBryanPiatt’s story?

The podcast medium is a great way to bring important stories about writers and literary history to a broad audience. As I’ve learned during more than 30 years of teaching and public speaking, many people are interested in stories about authors and literar

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Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt

American poet (1836–1919)

Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt
"A woman of the century"
Born	Sarah Morgan Bryan August 11, 1836 Lexington, Kentucky, U.S.
Died	December 22, 1919(1919-12-22) (aged 83) Caldwell, New Jersey, U.S.
Resting place	Spring Grove Cemetery, Cincinnati, Ohio, U.S.
Occupation	Poet
Language	English
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Henry Female College
Notable works	A Woman's Poems
Partner	John James Piatt (m. 1861; died 1917)
Children	7

Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt (Sallie M. Bryan; August 11, 1836 – December 22, 1919) was an American poet. Her career began in the mid-1850s and lasted into the early twentieth century. She published hundreds of poems in nationally circulated newspapers, magazines, and anthologies as well as in eighteen volumes of poems, two of which she co-authored with her husband, the poet John James Piatt (also known as "J.J.").^[2] Although Sarah Piatt is not well known today, during her lifetime