Sara Bawany
Sara Bawany is an award-winning published poet, a freelance editor, and a clinical social worker based in Austin, Texas. Centering her writing around her experience and identity as a Muslim woman while exploring overlapping themes of faith, diaspora, and resistance, she began sharing her work publicly on her Instagram page (@sara.bawany) in 2016, garnering several thousand readers, and she compiled and published her work into her first book in September 2018 titled: "(w)holehearted: a collection of poetry and prose" which won Daybreak Press Publishing's "Best Poetry Book" award. Her second book, "quarter life crisis" will be published in 2023. She was selected as a finalist in Button Poetry's 2021 Annual Chapbook Contest and her work has been featured on TEDx, ACLU TX, Muslim Youth Musings, Voyage Dallas Magazine, Arlington Literary Journal, and Brown Girl Magazine. She has spoken and performed at more than 100 different engagements both in her social work capacity and as a poet. Sara has a small freelance editing business that aims to empower and strengthen writers who seek her assistance. She is an instructor at BEAM Academy where she teaches Muslim youth about the intersection of poetry and Islam, and serves as the Process Manager at House of Amal, which is a collaborative writing space meant to empower and support Muslim writers.
Award-winning poet, Sara Bawany’s second poetry book, Quarter Life Crisis, dives headfirst into the brutal reexamining of a period in one’s life described by many as a time of uncertainty, insecurity, and doubt for the future. This short narrative collection embraces the unknown, inviting readers to ask their own questions about “the way things are,” while positioning itself at the precarious intersection of faith, mental health, and justice.
Bawany’s unique voice is unapologetic in critiquing not just the capitalist standards and expectations of young adults but also the beliefs in her earlier collection of poetry, (w)holehearted: a collection of poetry and prose, interrogating much of what she previously established as fact. Bawany writes fearlessly through a Muslim woman’s voice, but her questions are relevant for everyone, regardless of faith. Readers will sob, laugh, and sigh in relief through this reckoning with both the Divine as well as one’s own ego. quarter life crisis is as much a poetry book as it is a call to action; not only to simply consider a post-pandemic world but to begin rebuilding a world in which we are unafraid to challenge the norms and fearless enough to choose growth through our harshest moments.