Sara Petersen’s essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, Redivider, The Washington Post, The Lily, The Rumpus, Catapult, Hippocampus, Neutrons Protons, Brain, Child, Entropy, Vol.1 Brooklyn, Bustle, and elsewhere. She lives on the Seacoast of New Hampshire, where she’s working on a collection of essays about her attempts to live up to either feminine or feminist ideals, only to end up somewhere in the messy middle.