Poet, essayist, activist, former director of Split This Rock
Let Our Aging Bodies Sing
A guest blog post at Trish Hopkinson’s Selfish Poet
The very wonderful Trish Hopkinson put out the word looking for guest blog posts. So I wrote about writing about sex and the middle aged/early old female body. These poems show up in Call Me Yes, my 3rd collection forthcoming from The Word Works later this month, October 2026.
Here’s a short excerpt: “Because middle-aged and older women are so often silenced or dismissed or worse, mocked, the sheer act of writing our desires is a political act. As the poem, ‘Tongued,’ which opens the book’s second section ends: the tongue writes its own / constitution right here in our beds.“
Sarah Browning is the author of Killing Summer (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2017) and Whiskey in the Garden of Eden (The Word Works, 2007). She is co-founder and for 10 years was Executive Director of Split This Rock: Poems of Provocation & Witness. She is an Associate Fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies and recipient of the Lillian E. Smith Writer-in-Service Award as well as of fellowships from the DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities, Mesa Refuge, Yaddo, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She has been guest editor or co-edited special issues of Beltway Poetry Quarterly, The Delaware Poetry Review, and three issues of POETRY magazine. From 2006 to 2019 Browning co-hosted the Sunday Kind of Love poetry series at Busboys and Poets in Washington, DC. She has been nominated numerous times for the Pushcart Prize. She received an MFA in poetry and creative nonfiction from Rutgers University Camden in 2021 and lives in Philadelphia, PA.
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