Sarah Tavis
Adjunct ProfessorEnglish
(360) 754-7711 ext 4311
stavis@spscc.edu
As associate faculty at SPSCC, I work to create equitable learning communities that center the cultural diversity and learning needs of my students. My choice to teach at a community college is based on my own experience as a former community college student who attended school as a young, single mother. These life experiences drive my commitment to providing inclusive and equitable education to the students I work with. It was my community college faculty that helped me navigate the tricky terrain of work, school, and mothering within a culture that saw in my daughter and I mistakes rather than potentials. My faculty encouraged my dreams for a successful future, and I work to provide my students the same encouragement.
Sarah Tavis has been a Texas punk girl, a teen mom, a letterpress printer, a book seller, a publisher, and a teacher of writing: each of these fueling a different experience with the written/spoken word. She received her BA in Human Development and Creative Writing from The Evergreen State College and her MFA in Writing and Poetics from Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, where she studied writing pedagogy. She has taught writing to elementary and middle school students, teen parents, and undergraduates and is a co-founder of The 3rd Thing Press, an independent publisher of the work of primarily Indigenous people, women, queer people, and people of color. Sarah is deeply embedded in her Olympia, WA community through work with organizations such as Community Print, The International Trauma Treatment Program, and The Mary Sheridan Foundation, which she co-founded and helped establish as a non-profit organization to improve experiences of pregnancy, childbirth, and early parenting. She has also initiated and participated in various community-based creative endeavors, most notably the publishing collective, Triceratops Press. Sarah’s rich and varied background, her creative energy, her gift for building strength and resiliency by fostering individual and group capacity, as well as her keen editorial eye are reflected in her current work as English faculty at South Puget Sound Community College, where she advises the student editorial staff of the college’s literary journal, The Percival Review.