Sara Marinelli

Sara Marinelli grew up in Italy, where she received her PhD in Anglophone Literatures from the University of Rome, "La Sapienza." After completing a post-doctoral fellowship at UC Santa Cruz, she decided to make the Bay Area her home, and earned an MFA in Creative Writing at San Francisco State University. 

She is a fiction and nonfiction writer, a Teaching Artist at the San Francisco Opera, and the 2024-2025 Brown Handler Writer in Residence at the San Francisco Public Library. Sara is also an independent audio-producer and editor. She created her audio-series, Letters to Italy, and co-edits the podcast This is Actually Happening.

Her academic interests are contemporary women authors of color, post-colonial literature, Italian Studies, and Creative Writing. 

• Literary studies
• Creative writing
• Italian studies

• Post-colonial literature
• Migration literature
• Women authors of color
• Italian literature and film

• San Francisco State University, MFA in Creative Writing
• The University of Rome, "La Sapienza," PhD in Literatures in English

• Adjunct Professor in Humanities, San Francisco State University
• Post-Doctoral Fellow in Post-Colonial Literatures, The University of Naples
• Visiting Graduate Fellow, The Center for Cultural Studies, UC Santa Cruz

• Recipient of the Distinguished Teaching Award of the Year, 2023, University of San Francisco.
• Shortlisted for the Women’s International Podcast Awards 2022.

• "Elena Ferrante and Me. I don't know her, she know me." Pummarol Lit Magazine, 2022.
• "Letters to Italy," Audio-documentary, 2021.
• “Un intreccio plurigenerazionale – Insegnare l’oltrecanone”, Leggendaria, 2021.
• "Il privilegio della pelle bianca," Nazione Indiana, 2020.
• “Shelter in Place (l’Italia in una stanza)”, Nazione Indiana, 2020.
• "50 Lire," Blue Mesa Review, 2018.