Sara Parrell is a poet and community health nurse, working in the Madison Public Schools with a focus on children’s mental health and well-being, and teaching students from the University of Wisconsin School of Nursing. Her poetry has appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Tupelo Quarterly, qarrtsiluni, Wisconsin People and Ideas, Verse Wisconsin, and she co-curates The Bridge Poetry Series at the Chazen Museum of Art. She was awarded first prize in the 2008 Poetry Center of Chicago’s Juried Reading for her manuscript Psalms of New Orleans, and received the Leo Love Poetry Merit Award in 2012 from the Taos Writers’ Conference. Her most recent project is a collaboration with photographer Thomas Ferrella, HYBRID: Transformed by Word and Image, and was partially funded by a City of Madison BLINK grant supporting art in public places. Her poems, and those she selected from other poets, are paired with Ferrella’s images and placed in Green Cabs in Madison (soon to be expanded to Milwaukee and other cities) with the aim of bringing art to the people in a unique environment where a chance encounter may enrich a moment.
