About

Chivas Sandage’s guest op-ed, “We’re a Problem: White Women Have to Step Up for All” appears in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Her essays and poems have also appeared in Ms. Magazine, Texas Observer, Hartford Courant, The Rumpus, Southern Humanities Review, Salmagundi, Public Seminar, Deceleration, The Long Now, and others.

Sandage won the 2021 Claire Keyes Poetry Award, judged by poet Afaa Michael Weaver, for a group of 8 poems from Summertime in America, her recently completed second collection. She is the author of Hidden Drive (Antrim House), a finalist for the 2012 Foreword Book of the Year Award in poetry and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. 

Sandage is a digital columnist at Ms. Magazine and her column, Ms. Muse, features contemporary feminist poets and essays on the intersection of poetry, politics, and our lives. Stay tuned for a reboot inspired by the NY Times’ canceled poetry column. 

Currently, she is at work on THE WIND BLEW THROUGH US: Love, Murder, & Justice in Texas, forthcoming in hardcover from the University of Texas Press. The Massachusetts Cultural Council’s 2020 Artist Fellowship Program awarded Sandage a $1,500 artist grant as a finalist for her work on this narrative nonfiction book about the 2012 double shooting of Kristene Chapa and Mollie Olgin, a young lesbian couple attacked while on a date in Portland, Texas.

She won second place and honorable mention in the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s 2022 Barbara Mandigo Kelly Peace Poetry Contest. Poet Ilya Kaminsky chose the title poem of her forthcoming second collection as a finalist for the Georgia Review’s 2020 Loraine Williams Poetry Prize. Kaminsky wrote: “Out of engagement with the natural world and history comes a deeper understanding and as we ‘travel backward / and forward in time we see that sand, too, is not mere sand but ‘braille under our feet.’ ” The poem was also longlisted for awards from Frontier Poetry and Palette Poetry’s Sappho Prize.

Sandage was a finalist for the 2018 Sonia Sanchez-Langston Hughes Poetry Contest and the 2017 Patricia Dobler Poetry Award. The poet Naomi Shihab Nye chose her work for an award and publication as runner-up for the 2017 Auburn Witness Poetry Prize. Two of her poems received national awards in the 2014 Provincetown Outermost Poetry Contest judged by Marge Piercy.

Her work has also appeared in the Artful Dodge, Daily Hampshire Gazette, Drunken Boat, Equality Texas, Evergreen Review, Hampshire Life Magazine, Knockout Magazine, Naugatuck River Review, The New Civil Rights Movement, SmokeLong Quarterly, Southern Women’s Review, Upstreet, Verse, Manthology: Poems on the Male Experience (Univ. of Iowa Press, ‘06), Morning Song: Poems for New Parents (St. Martin’s Press, ’11), Paradise Found: A Walking Tour of Northampton, Massachusetts through Poetry and Art (Levellers Press, ’14), and Same-Sex Marriage: The Moral and Legal Debate (Prometheus Books, ‘04).

As an Assistant Professor at Westfield State University, Sandage taught Composition, World Literature, and Contemporary Cross-Cultural Literature. She earned an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and a BA from Bennington College. Connecticut Center for the Book at the Connecticut Humanities Council awarded a planning grant for a high school writing program she designed. The Northampton Arts Council, supported in part by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, has awarded artist grants for her writing, teaching, and performance work.

Since 2006, Chivas has taught weekly women’s writing workshops. An editor, writing coach, and consultant, she works with students, writers, and poets.

Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, Sandage grew up primarily in Houston, Texas. She has also lived in Galveston, Texas; Santa Fe, New Mexico; Northampton, Massachusetts; and New York City, New York. Currently, Chivas lives with her wife in San Marcos, Texas, and Easthampton, Massachusetts.