Publications

Books

Please consider buying books at independent bookstores or ordering directly from the publisher or from Powells.com, a unionized shop, or from Bookshop.org, a site that benefits independent bookstores. Thank you!

Call Me Yes, a book of poems, forthcoming from FlowerSong Press, 2026

Advance Praise for Call Me Yes:
“In work that reads equally as a love letter to both Washington DC and Philadelphia and simultaneously chronicles the jagged heartbreak of divorce and the surprise of new love, in ‘Call Me Yes’ Sarah Browning covers life’s ever-changing landscape with poems that sing to the body and make a boldface call to pleasure.”
– Teri Ellen Cross Davis, author of a more perfect Union

“These poems yank desire from the staid lines of rhyme and form, instead enacting pleasure and pain with a rare immediacy. Browning gives us the indispensable authentic voice in a book that’s not afraid to be broken, hungry, and wildly ravenous. In ‘Tongued,’ ‘the tongue writes its own/ constitution right here in our beds.’ This is a rousing book in which the clitoris speaks, and it says Yes, yes, oh yes! And you will too, dear reader, as you breathe in these stirring, dazzling poems.”
– Jan Beatty, author of Dragstripping



Killing Summer (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2017) – read more

Whiskey in the Garden of Eden (The Word Works, 2007)

D.C. Poets Against the War: An Anthology, co-editor with Michele Elliott and Danny Rose (Argonne House Press, 2004, out of print). You can read about the history of D.C. Poets Against the War at Beltway Poetry Quarterly.

Poems in Literary Journals

• “April, 2025, USA” and “To unfurl” in Freedom Issue of About Place Journal
• “Flash Floods” at Bracken
• 2 “pain” poems at The Mid-Atlantic Review, as part of the portfolio, Amplifying Disabled Voices
• “My DC Longing” and “Promise” at Common Ground Review
• “I Am Asked What Another World Looks Like,” audio of Sarah reading the poem, Notre Dame Review
• “The Silence Pounding Inside You,” Rogue Agent
• “Abecedarian for the Aging Female Body” at Sheila-Na-Gig
• “Call Me Yes” in Elysium Review, title poem of 3rd book of poems
• “Our thing,” “pain,” “Quarantine, Final Days,” and “Dr BigBeef, or Internet Dating Over 50” at ONE ART: A Journal of Poetry
• “In Your Darkness” and “Suppose” in Doubleback Review; originally published in the now-defunct PUBLIC POOL
• “2020 this fucking year” in WORDPEACE
• “Quarantine, Early Days” in ASP Bulletin
• “The Clitoris Speaks” in RockPaperPoem
• “Ukraine” in Quartet – scroll down in Spring/Summer 2023 Issue
• “Monday Morning” in Rhino
• “Dijon Kizzee Loved Anything on Wheels,” finalist for the Stephen Dunn Poetry Prize at Solstice Literary Magazine (Content warning: police brutality, some of the racist horrors of American history)
• “Chicago Saturdays, 1969” and “Do I call them the lonely years” in Maryland Literary Review
• “Sweet Labor” in Mike Maggio’s 30 for 30 Project
• “Beyond” in Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Venus Thrash tribute portfolio
• 3 “pain” poems at Anti-Heroin Chic
• “On Seeing” in Poetry in Bloom project of SWWIM and O, Miami Poetry Festival. Throughout the month of April 2021, the poems in the project were folded into origami pinwheels and added to floral bouquets delivered across the greater Miami area, courtesy of Dolly’s Florist.
• “Desire,” “After I Knew,” and “For the turkey buzzards” in Painted Bride Quarterly (You can also listen to the journal’s hilarious podcast, Slush Pile, in which the editors discuss these poems and choose them for publication)
• “Tongued,” Honorable Mention in the Joy Harjo Poetry Contest, chosen by Carolyn Forché, in Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts (PDF – page 12 – contact me for a Word version if the PDF is not accessible to you)
• “Like the Stars, Broken and Hungry” in Tinderbox Poetry Journal
• “The Forever Knot” in Green Mountains Review
• “Everywhere” in Pine Hills Review
• “I’m sorry, but” in About Place: Dignity as an Endangered Species
• “Memory of Enchantment” in SWIMM Every Day
• “Ballad of the Seven Days,” “We All Have Our Thing,” “Body, Self, and All,” and “Day 7” in ArLiJo: Arlington Literary Journal (issue 105)
• “Praisesong” Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day
• “In Mind, Two Months” and “Full & Empty, 7 Months” in Mom Egg Review
• “The Neighborhood, Changing” in Beltway Poetry Quarterly Sterling Brown Tribute Issue
• “Joint Custody” in Splendid Wake-up’s Summer Poetry Pop-Up
• “Greeting” in Scoundrel Time
• “Gas,” Split This Rock Poem of the Week/The Quarry
• “When the sun returns” in POETRY magazine
• “US Lifts Vietnam Arms Ban” in PoetsArtists
• “Names she tried to teach me” in Truck
• “On My Triumphant Return to the DMV,” Kore Press Poem of the Week
• “Photo of a Woman with Nipples and a Cigarette” at Rogue Agent
• “Foreclosure” at WORD SOUP
• “Hot Priests,” “Going to See the Caravaggios,” and “Coming After Me” at Delaware Poetry Review
• “This Is the Poem,” “Petworth, Early Evening,” “Cawing Down the Airwaves,” “Killing Summer,” “Titian’s San Cristoforo,” and “I go for days,” at Vox Populi
• “Reading Dante’s Inferno on the Anniversary of Hurricane Katrina”at HEArt Online
• “Burning and Splendor ” in WORDPEACE
• “The Walton Mountain Museum” in Beltway Poetry Quarterly: The Museum Issue
• “The Final Talk,” “In a City of Barricades, I Dream of Baghdad” in Beltway Poetry Quarterly Split This Rock Issue
• “Columbia Shuttle Breaks Up Over Texas,” “I’m Not Homeless, My Son Fell Asleep,” and “Hard Headed Woman, or Getting It On with Yusef Islam” in Innisfree Poetry Journal
• “The Fifth Fact” at The Poetry Foundation
• “Prayer of the Ashamed American” at Beltway Poetry Quarterly Walt Whitman Issue
• “That Summer,” “Freedom Songs,” “How to Leave,” “Something They Never Tell You,” “The Fullness, the Bees,” and “Circus Performer” at Beltway Poetry Quarterly

Essays and Op Eds

• “A Constellation Twinned With Mine: Music as an Inroad to Personal History,” blog of Writers in Progress
• “We White Women All Have an Inner Karen — It’s past time to send her packing,” Movable Type (issue 1), the publication of 1455 Literary Arts (PDF – page 19 – please contact me for a Word version if the PDF is not accessible to you)
• “Split This Rock: Celebrating 10 Years of Poetry, Witness & Resistance,” The Writer’s Notebook
• “To Insist on the Depth and Complexity of Our Lives,” VIDA Web
• “There’s No Defending Founding Fathers Who Practiced Slavery, ” OtherWords
• “Nuts to First Class: The growing class divide on airplanes looks a lot like America’s,” OtherWords
• “The Intersection of Peril & Joy: Sarah Browning introduces Sharon Olds,” Blog This Rock
• “A Crime Against Humanity Sent Me to Harvard,” OtherWords
• Comments upon presenting the 2014 Busboys and Poets Award to Martín Espada, Busboys and Poets Blog
• “be loving ourselves/be sisters: Lucille Clifton Reminds Us that We are American Poetry,” Beltway Poetry Quarterly
• “To Scratch Away a Silence: On the Work of Jake Adam York,” Pilot Light Journal
• “Food for The Soul: Poetry That Pierces Injustice,” On The Issues Magazine

Interviews

• “Stay Brave, with Leah Umansky,” a beautiful and challenging monthly series on Substack
• “Poetry, Politics and Really Hot Priests,” The Poetry Saloncast, with Tresha Faye Haefner
• “Poetry of provocation and witness: Sarah Browning,” on Vermont Conversation with David Goodman (audio)
• “Sarah Browning: On Poetry & Politics,” Origins
• “John Feffer interviews poet Sarah Browning,” Patreon (free audio)
• “Q&A: Sarah Browning Splits This Rock,” Poets & Writers Magazine
• “Poetry as Provocation, ” On the Commons
• “Can She Get a Witness? Five Questions with Sarah Browning,” Post No Ills Magazine

Editing

POETRY magazine, three issues co-edited with Don Share, with introductions by Sarah Browning, then Executive Director of Split This Rock:

– April 2018 – featuring Elizabeth Acevedo, Kazim Ali, Ellen Bass, Sherwin Bitsui, Kwame Dawes, Camille T. Dungy, Ilya Kaminsky, Sharon Olds, Sonia Sanchez, Solmaz Sharif, Terisa Siagatonu, Paul Tran, Javier Zamora

– April 2016 – featuring Jennifer Bartlett, Jan Beatty, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Regie Cabico, Dominique Christina, Martha Collins, Aracelis Girmay, Linda Hogan, Dawn Lundy Martin, Craig Santos Perez, Ocean Vuong

– March 2014 – featuring Sheila Black, Franny Choi, Eduardo C. Corral, Gayle Danley, Natalie Diaz, Joy Harjo, Yusef Komunyakaa, Maria Melendez Kelson, Dunya Mikhail, Shailja Patel, Claudia Rankine, Tim Seibles, Myra Sklarew, Danez Smith, Anne Waldman, Wang Ping

Delaware Poetry Review, 2016, Volume 8, Number 1 – featuring Saida Agostini, Abigail Beckel, Henry Braun, Cyrus Cassells, Teri Ellen Cross Davis, Fred Joiner, Kelli Stevens Kane, David Keplinger, Cliff Lynn, Samuel Miranda, Katy Richey

Beltway Poetry Quarterly Wartime Issue, Spring 2006 – featuring 40 DC-area poets confronting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and at home, including Luis Alberto Ambroggio, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Grace Cavalieri, Zein El-Amine, Yael Flusberg, David Gewanter, Fred Joiner, E. Ethelbert Miller, Linda Pastan, Venus Thrash, Melissa Tuckey, and many more.

Sarah Browning pierces the veil of artifice. She lives, breathes and stands for justice; using poetry to create the larger conversation. Her poems may be of real world effects, or matters central to her spirit, yet we can count on each poem to be a line of inquiry that searches for truth in action. Part of a spirited community that is working for social justice, she remains highly individual, like any true artist.

Grace Cavalieri, Poet Laureate of Maryland