Sarah Sgro is an English PhD candidate and Judith Kerman Fellow in Technology and the Humanities at SUNY Buffalo. Her interdisciplinary dissertation examines how ostensibly extraneous “data waste” is captured and disciplined under contemporary surveillance capitalism to materialize structures of power and profit, transforming individuals into legible data subjects. Elucidating these black-boxed dynamics, she examines poetry, new media, and other creative-critical practices that reappropriate digital decay and regeneration as radical resistance.
Sgro received her MFA in Poetry from the University of Mississippi in 2018, where she wrote her debut poetry collection If The Future is a Fetish (YesYesBooks 2019), an intertextual meditation on the queer possibilities of motherhood. The collection, which poet Natalie Eilbert called a “psychosexual novel-in-verse” of “Plathian disgust” and “Goya-level anguish,” won the 2019 IPPY Independent Voice Award and has been reviewed in outlets such as Pleiades and American Microreviews. Sgro’s poetry and creative nonfiction have appeared in journals inclusing Annulet: A Journal of Poetics, Peach Mag, and The Offing, and she has been nominated for Best New Poets and the Pushcart Prize. She is currently drafting her debut novel Dead Links, a project that explores three characters’ fraught digital-physical attachments as they navigate online and irl landscapes of grief, groupthink, and self-discovery.
Sgro previously served as co-lead for the Palah Light Lab, a creative and critical community for queer and feminist new media that centers the relationship between social justice and technology. For the past decade, she has taught undergraduate classes in literature, creative writing, and composition and has worked as a consultant at university writing centers.