Sabrina Orah Mark
Visiting Poet
The symbolic vocabulary of fairy tales is interwoven throughout Sabrina Orah Mark’s book of lyric essays, Happily (Random House, 2023). A story about a loved one’s cancer treatment and its physical effects—specifically, the loss of hair and the fashioning of a wig—becomes a Rapunzel story. An ordinary splinter becomes a token that grants a crow the power of speech.
Remarkably, these essays stay rooted in the real world, and rather than obscure that world’s very real violence and threat, they serve as a resource to help navigate it. In a 2024 interview with the Jewish Book Council, Mark says: “Happily began as a desire to record, and the desire to keep my sons safe…Raising Black Jewish boys in the American South…felt like putting together a puzzle with half the pieces missing… I decided to turn to fairy tales, a place even older than childhood.”
Mark is the author of three other books: two collections of poetry, Tsim Tsum (Saturnalia, 2009) and The Babies (Saturnalia, 2004), as well as a collection of short stories, Wild Milk (Dorothy, 2018). In the same interview with the Jewish Book Council, when asked her thoughts on moving between genres, Mark responds as a narrator of tales: “Many years ago I met a poem, but when she opened her coat, she looked like a story. And when she spoke, she spoke essay, though her first language was poetry. She spoke with a beautiful accent. And she moved like a novel in the evening, but in the morning she moved like a line of ancient verse. Which is to say, she is the poem that I wish all my writing would be.”
Mark will read at Leo Weinstein Auditorium in Wright Hall on Tuesday, February 25, 2025 at 7 p.m. A livestream will be available on the BDPC YouTube page.