Sarah Freligh is the author of Sort of Gone (Turning Point Books, 2008). Her work has appeared in The Sun, Rattle, Brevity, Barn Owl Review, Cimarron Review, Iowa Woman, Third Coast, Tar River Poetry, and Painted Bride Quarterly and on Garrison Keillor's "Writer's Almanac." Among her awards are a 2009 poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a poetry grant from the Constance Saltonstall Foundation in 2006, and an Artist's Exchange grant from the New York State Council for the Arts in 1997. She is a visiting assistant professor of English and creative writing at St. John Fisher College in Rochester, New York.

Books by Sarah Freligh:

Other poems on the web by Sarah Freligh:
"Wondrous"
"Sex Education"

"In A Brief Natural History of an American Girl, Sarah F1936628147 pulls you into the car of a 1950's girlhood and you stay, compelled by the journey through sexual awakening and into womanhood. It's a difficult story. The narrator loses a lot—she gives kisses to the boss at Donut Delite, her virginity to a boy in a cornfield, her body to men she knows, or doesn't. She gives away a baby. She buries her mother. And hope, how 'easy to give her away.' And yet not quite. Through the accumulation of experience, through the ability to look clearly and name what she sees, F1936628147 insists on possibility. The poems draw our attention, then elicit a shiver of recognition. This is what one girlhood looks like; this is what human experience looks like. The journey is not over, she reminds us. You 'are not there yet.'"
—Wendy Mnookin