Sarah Williams-Devereux is a poet, artist, and educator. She leads poetry workshops for the Madwomen in the Attic Creative Writing Workshops at Carlow University in Pittsburgh, PA, and is the series editor for the annual Madwomen anthology, Voices from the Attic. She is certified in Amherst Writers & Artists writing group leadership with training to lead writing workshops for historically silenced communities, and she is an AWA Apprentice Training Instructor. She is also certified in transformative language arts foundations from the Transformative Language Arts Network, where she volunteered on the classes and certification committees. She received her MA in teaching writing from Johns Hopkins University and received her BFA in art (painting) from Seton Hill College. She is a member of the Pittsburgh Poetry Society.

Her poetry has been published in F(r)ictionLog, Snapdragon: A Journal of Art & Healing, Sampsonia Way Magazine, Pittsburgh City Paper, multiple volumes of the Voices from the Attic anthology (Carlow University Press), and the anthologies Show Us Your Papers (Main Street Rag, 2020), Is It Hot In Here Or Is It Just Me? Women Over Forty Write on Aging (Social Justice Anthologies, 2019), Nasty Women & Bad Hombres (Lascaux Editions, 2017) and Pittsburgh Love Stories (The New Yinzer, 2004). She has been a featured poet on Prosody, the WESA-FM radio program dedicated to the work of contemporary writers. She has read her work widely through the Pittsburgh area. From June 2022-May 2023, her poem, “Nexus,” will be installed on the North Main Street Bridge in Greensburg, PA, as part of the Westmoreland Museum of American Art’s Bridging the Gap/Analog Scroll public art project.

Her photographs, prints, and conceptual mixed media works have been shown at exhibitions and community art projects sponsored by the Associated Artists of Pittsburgh, the August Wilson Center for African American Culture, Everyday Art Projects, the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, the Sweetwater Center for the Arts, and Women of Visions, among others. She has served on exhibition planning committees for the Associated Artists of Pittsburgh and for the University of Pittsburgh’s University Art Gallery and co-curated with janera solomon an exhibit for the BridgeSpotters Collective.

Williams-Devereux also has extensive experience in leading tours, workshops, and community dialogues with diverse audiences through her past work in museum and art education, specifically at The Andy Warhol Museum, The Mattress Factory, and the August Wilson Center for African American Culture. As an Artist Educator at the Warhol, she co-facilitated daily dialogues for visitors to process their reactions to the 2001 Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America exhibit. In 2003, with Jamilla Rice, she co-led Free to Be: African American Women’s Hair Circle, part of Continuing the Dialogue: The Warhol Artist Educator Projects. These weekly reading- & writing-based discussions among a diverse group of Black women culminated in an exhibition at Artists Image Resource in Pittsburgh, PA. The Continuing the Dialogue projects won the Thomas Merton Center’s 2003 New Person Award honoring art and activism.

As Arts Education Coordinator at PITT ARTS at the University of Pittsburgh, she managed a two-year research project on African American young adult arts participation: leading focus groups, analyzing research, and co-authoring Our Stories, Our Selves: The African American Arts Project: A Study of African American Young Adult Arts Participation (PITT ARTS, University of Pittsburgh, 2006).

She was also a member of the Three Rivers Community Foundation‘s grantmaking committee for ten years (committee co-chair for several of them), helping to fund grassroots social justice projects in southwestern Pennsylvania.