Piatt biography

Sarah’s Antebellum Social Network: Kentucky Abolitionist Mattie Griffith

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In this episode, we speak with Joe Lockard, an associate professor of English at Arizona State University.  Joe is a specialist in nineteenth-century American literature, particularly the literature of U.S. slavery and early African American literature.  Joe talks about his groundbreaking research recovering the life and work of Mattie Griffith, a young Kentucky poet.  In the 1850s, when Sarah was breaking out as famous teen poet Sallie M. Bryan, she shared social circles with Mattie by way of their shared mentor, Louisville Daily Journal editor George D. Prentice.  Mattie’s hatred of enslavement led her to leave Kentucky for the North, where she published a pseudo-slave narrative titled Autobiography of a Female Slave—which made her famous in the abolitionist movement and a pariah back home.

Interview date: 2 February 2024

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Mock Diamonds

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In this episode, our podcast host Elizabeth Renker introduces Stephanie Burt to her own favorite poem of Sarah’s, “Mock Diamonds,” one of her great poems of the Reconstruction period immediately following the U.S. Civil War. Elizabeth reads the poem aloud and tells us about the historical background.  She and Stephanie break the poem down stanza by stanza, exploring how Sarah created an appealing surface for general readers and a simultaneous deeper layer that scrutinizes white nostalgia for the Old South, the emergent Lost Cause ideology, and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan.  Stephanie calls “Mock Diamonds” “a poem for our time.”

Interview date: 26 September 2025

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Build It and They Will Come

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In this episode, Jolie Braun, the Ohio State University Libraries Curator of Modern Literature and Manuscripts, speaks with our podcast host and Piatt biographer Elizabeth Renker.  Elizabeth talks about how she first learned about Sarah; how the literary canon works; and why she has dedicated her efforts over more than two decades to bringing Sarah back into public memory.

Interview date: July 27, 2020

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Poets in Exile

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In this episode, we speak with Bernadette Whelan, Professor Emeritus in the Department of History, University of Limerick, Ireland.  Her scholarly expertise includes extensive work on American-Irish diplomatic relations and on women’s history.  Sarah’s husband John James (J.J.) was employed by the US government as Consul to Queenstown, Ireland  (now Cobh) from 1882-1893.  At the time, Queenstown was a major port for migration to America; these were also years when the Irish people increasingly resisted British colonial rule.  Professor Whelan explains the Piatts’ sympathies with the Irish cause as well as how Sarah, J.J. and their children—some of whom stayed in Ireland when their parents returned to the U.S.—developed transatlantic identities.

Interview date: August 23, 2021

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