Sarah Duffett MFAWriting Advisor

Sarah Duffett is a writer, editor, and educator from New England. She graduated summa cum laude from Brandeis University, where she studied English, creative writing, and Afro-American studies. She then went on to receive her MFA in prose from the Helen Zell Writers Program at the University of Michigan, where she received a Helen Zell Fellowship. She has taught creative writing and pedagogy at the University of Michigan as well as at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education. For the past several years, Sarah has been supporting applicants to highly selective graduate and undergraduate programs with their written application materials.

In her undergraduate years, Sarah co-founded a writing workshop dedicated to developing playwrights on campus; she also served as the co-president of Brandeis’ longest running sketch comedy troupe, Boris’ Kitchen. She’s particularly proud of her honors thesis, a short story collection she wrote over two years, which earned the department’s award for best thesis.

In graduate school, Sarah was part of a student-led push towards hiring additional femme/POC fiction faculty. This push resulted in our department hiring of two new three-year visiting professors, and one tenure-track professor. During my fellowship year, I worked with the assistant-director of the writing department to develop and co-teach a first-ever creative writing pedagogy course for first time graduate instructors.

Sarah has always been a writer—as a kid, you could find her on a given evening tucked into bed, writing fantasy stories by the light of a book lamp. Her passion for Black studies emerged after taking a course in Black feminist thought. She loved the rigor, the purpose she found in activism, and the way it challenged and shaped her perspective on American identity. She currently lives in Massachusetts, where she is hard at work on her novel.