Elizabeth Renker

Kentucky-born Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt (1836-1919) published more than 600 poems during her lifetime—to transatlantic acclaim—but fell into obscurity upon her death. Rediscovered in the 1990s, she quickly gained stature as a major artist whose work addresses urgent sociopolitical topics of her time, including the antebellum South, the Civil War, Reconstruction, the status of women, and the Irish and Ireland, where she lived from 1882 to 1893. While a growing body of articles, edited book chapters, and conference presentations stresses her historical and aesthetic importance, scholarship has yet to produce a monograph about her, in part because fundamental archival research in the primary materials of her life remains to be done. “Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt: A Biography” undertakes the archival work necessary to establish her firmly as a key figure in literary history, one whose poetic innovations both arose from and recorded the fractures of her age.