Sarah Franek (she/her) grew up studying dance and performance art in the Appalachian hills of West Virginia. She often smelled like pickles because the holler house her family lived in did not have running water until her father took the cast-away fermenting barrels from a pickle and kraut shop to rig a plumbing system in the attic. Running water at long last, pickle aroma thereafter.

For over a decade, Sarah starred in the one-woman staged adaptation of The American Place Theatre's “Literature to Life” presentation of The Glass Castle, from the best-selling memoir by Jeannette Walls, adapted and directed by Wynn Handman.

Sarah is a Licensed Clinician of Social Work. She hold a Masters in Transpersonal Psychology from Sofia University and a Masters in Clinical Social Work from Fordham University. Her early work supported survivors of trauma with the Beck Institute of Fordham University facilitating group and narrative therapy for a community based program for formerly incarcerated individuals. And she served on the Trager-Lemp Center: Treating Trauma and Promoting Resilience team at Westchester Jewish Community Services. Presently, she has a private practice and works with Seaglass Clinical Consulting.

Sarah’s work as an actor gives her writing strength of character, and her work as a psychotherapist lends an understanding of the complexities of the human spirit. She began writing her debut novel, LITTLE SPARROW, to recover from vicarious traumatization. While working on the novel, she took an iPhone 13 and a small crew into the Appalachian hills for three days to ask questions: What would LITTLE SPARROW feel like captured in light? How would filming inform the story? Does the story fly off the page? LITTLE SPARROW was later workshopped as a manuscript with Jennifer Haigh at the Hindman Settlement School’s Appalachian Writers’ Workshop.

She lives between NY and Bermuda with her husband and two children. She no longer smells of pickles, but she is especially welcoming to people who step into her office wearing the aroma of poverty.