About

 

Chivas Sandage is at work on THE WIND BLEW THROUGH US: Love, Murder, & Justice in Texas, forthcoming in hardcover from the University of Texas Press. The Massachusetts Cultural Council’s 2020 Artist Fellowship Program awarded Sandage a $1,500 artist grant as a finalist for her work on this narrative nonfiction book about the 2012 double shooting of Kristene Chapa and Mollie Olgin, a young lesbian couple attacked while on a date in Portland, Texas.

Sandage is a digital columnist at Ms. Magazine and her column, Ms. Muse, features contemporary feminist poets as well as essays on the intersection of poetry, politics, and our lives. Her essays and poems have appeared in the Texas Observer, Hartford Courant, The Rumpus, Southern Humanities Review, Salmagundi, Public Seminar, Deceleration, The Long Now, and the print version of Ms. Magazine, among others. 

She won Honorable Mention in the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s 2022 Barbara Mandigo Kelly Peace Poetry Contest. Sandage won the 2021 Claire Keyes Poetry Award, judged by poet Afaa Michael Weaver, for a group of 8 poems from Summertime in America, her recently completed second collection. Poet Ilya Kaminsky chose the title poem as a finalist for the Georgia Review’s 2020 Loraine Williams Poetry Prize. Kaminsky wrote: “Out of engagement with the natural world and history comes a deeper understanding and as we ‘travel backward / and forward in time we see that sand, too, is not mere sand but ‘braille under our feet.’ ” The poem was also longlisted for awards from Frontier Poetry and Palette Poetry’s Sappho Prize.

Sandage is the author of Hidden Drive (Antrim House), a finalist for the 2012 Foreword Book of the Year Award in poetry and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She was a finalist for the 2018 Sonia Sanchez-Langston Hughes Poetry Contest and the 2017 Patricia Dobler Poetry Award. The poet Naomi Shihab Nye chose her work for an award and publication as runner-up for the 2017 Auburn Witness Poetry Prize. Two of her poems received national awards in the 2014 Provincetown Outermost Poetry Contest judged by Marge Piercy.

Her work has also appeared in the Artful Dodge, Daily Hampshire Gazette, Drunken Boat, Equality Texas, Evergreen Review, Hampshire Life Magazine, Knockout Magazine, Naugatuck River Review, The New Civil Rights Movement, SmokeLong Quarterly, Southern Women’s Review, Upstreet, Verse, Manthology: Poems on the Male Experience (Univ. of Iowa Press, ‘06), Morning Song: Poems for New Parents (St. Martin’s Press, ’11), Paradise Found: A Walking Tour of Northampton, Massachusetts through Poetry and Art (Levellers Press, ’14), and Same-Sex Marriage: The Moral and Legal Debate (Prometheus Books, ‘04).

As an Assistant Professor at Westfield State University, Sandage taught Composition, World Literature, and Contemporary Cross-Cultural Literature. She earned an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and a BA from Bennington College. Connecticut Center for the Book at the Connecticut Humanities Council awarded a planning grant for a high school writing program she designed. The Northampton Arts Council, supported in part by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, has awarded artist grants for her writing, teaching, and performance work.

Since 2006, Chivas has taught women’s writing workshops and retreats in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Florida, and Texas. An editor, writing coach, and consultant, she works with students as well as poets and writers.

Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, Sandage grew up primarily in Houston, Texas. She has also lived in Galveston, Texas; Santa Fe, New Mexico; Northampton, Massachusetts; and New York City, New York. Currently, Chivas lives with her wife in Easthampton, Massachusetts, and San Marcos, Texas.

2 thoughts

  1. Hello!
    My friend Bryan lives in east works and I saw your flyer. Do you still have an opening in your workshop? If so, I am interested. Thanks a

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