Writing
Books
Better Times, winner of the 2017 Prairie Schooner Book Prize, finalist in Traditional Fiction for the 2019 CWA Book of the Year Awards – praise from Publishers Weekly, The New York Times, Foreword Reviews, Harvard Review, ENTROPY, and Tor.com; excerpt on LitHub; coverage in the Quad City Times; interview with Emily Collins for CutBank; interview with Seth Fried for Full Stop; interview with Jesse Hassenger for Fiction Writers Review; interview with Thais Miller for The Museum of Americana; interview with John King for The Drunken Odyssey podcast
Short Stories
“A House in Order,” Pleaides, forthcoming
“About Faces,” Epiphany, Issue 31 Fall/Winter 2023
“The Thing That Never Gets Closer,” New South, Issue 15.1
“Willingness,” Hunger Mountain, Issue 28
“A Kindness,” Fourteen Hills, Issue 27
“The Less Said,” CALYX, Vol. 32:1
“Errata,” Crazyhorse, Number 96
“Echos,” Nautilus, Issue 068
“The Catastrophists,” Shenandoah, Volume 6, No.1, Fall 2018
“Lookaftering,” Hayden’s Ferry Review, Fall/Winter Issue 63
“No Man’s Land,” Salt Hill, Issue 37
“When Her Father Was an Island,” Bellevue Literary Review, Fall 2016
“Foreigners,” Michigan Quarterly Review, Winter 2016
“Laika,” New Orleans Review, 2015; second publishing in The Pushcart Prize Anthology XLI, Best of the Small Presses 2017
“Those Who Left & Those Who Stayed,” Epiphany, Winter 2013/2014. Watch the author read an excerpt from this story here.
“Prospecting,” LIT, Summer 2011
“Cleavage,” Gulf Coast Fiction Prize Winner, Winter/Spring 2011
Online
“No tomorrow: confronting sobriety with Groundhog Day,” Tone Madison, 2024
“Bring Back the Vibes of Howards End, You Cowards,” LitHub, 2022
“On Loss, Time, and Hope: My Year Reading Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet,” LitHub, 2021
“It’s Kind of an Itchy Age,” Bright Wall/Dark Room, 2021
“10 Story Collections by Women You Should Read Right Now,” Publishers Weekly, 2018
“Sara Batkie on Jo Ann Beard,” Literary Mothers, 2014
Sara is part of the all-volunteer staff of the Chicago Review of Books. Read her articles here.
Sara is a contributing writer for the film site Crooked Marquee. Read her articles here.
Sara is also a contributing writer for the pop culture site SportsAlcohol. Read her articles here. She is also a frequent guest on their podcast, which you can listen to here.
Sara is part of a collective that hosts the weekly WORT 89.9 FM radio show Madison BookBeat. You can listen to the show here.
If you would like to see what Sara’s been watching, she keeps a very active Letterboxd account. It is currently the best place to find her on social media.
Follow Sara on GoodReads.
Follow the Better Times playlist on Spotify.