about senk
SENK savors life embraced by Appalachian and Massanutten mountains in a vale, where art such as photography, poetry, and pottery bring passion to each day. Explore these little delights, letting your heart harbor hope amidst the asperity that inadvertently exudes from life.
These pages proffer a pinpoint perspective on written and visual art created by Sarah Elizabeth Nichols Kohrs. SENK holds a BA cum laude with a double major in Archaeology and Classical Languages from The College of Wooster in Ohio and a Virginia state teaching licensure endorsed in Latin and Visual Arts for pre-K through 12th grade. In addition to being a writer and artist, Sarah homeschools her youngest son, serves as president of Valley Educational Center for the Creative Arts (VECCA), volunteers for Northern Shenandoah Valley Master Gardener Association (NSVMGA), as well as promotes other community non-profit groups. For 25 years, Sarah has grown and donated her hair to help create wigs for children suffering from hair loss illnesses. She is currently growing her ninth hair donation. Sarah is the 2023 Peter K Hixson poetry award recipient from Writer's Relief. Her first poetry chapbook publication, Chameleon Sky, won the 2022 Kingdoms in the Wild Poetry Award. SENK's poetry has also won awards through Poetry Society of Virginia, including: Dr. Lucile E. Thompson Memorial (2024), the Judah, Sarah, Grace, & Tom Memorial (2023), the Ekphrastic Poetry Award (2021), the Ada Sanderson Memorial (2019), and the Don Frew & John Newcomb Memorial (2019). To date, SENK has 67 poems and 70 photographs published in 78 different literary journals and anthologies around the world. For seven years, Sarah directed The Corhaven Graveyard, historically known as Sam Moore Slave Cemetery in Shenandoah County, Va and for which, she received the 2016 Preservation Virginia's George W. G. Stoner and Melville Jennings Research and Education Award. For eight years, she served as the Managing Editor for The Sow's Ear Poetry Review, a non-profit publication of poetry and fine art. Along with her bagpiping, geology-loving husband, whom she met on the volcanic island of Santorini in the Aegean Sea, and her three sons, Sarah lives in a renovated farmhouse (with an array of solar panels, rain barrels, compost bins, and a raised bed garden) in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. SENK humbly recognizes the Manahoac, who previously inhabited the land where her family settled in the mid-1700s and on which she resides today. |