Dr. Sara Houghteling

My teaching centers on the act of close reading: we study everything from poems to paintings, to novels, songs, and dictionaries. Along the way, we explore how close reading and interdisciplinary/intertextual conversations can inform and inspire our writing and expand our narrative and lyrical powers. I seek to cultivate a creative, inclusive, supportive classroom environment in which students can experiment with many different voices via a range of genres and literary forms. Visits from practicing writers and artists in our community, and field trips (to local publishing houses and museums and, occasionally, locales further afield) will both inspire students’ writing and give them a sense of what a career in the arts might entail.

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My work as a fiction writer has been shaped by archival historical research and engagement with the visual arts and music. I am the author of a novel, Pictures at an Exhibition (Knopf); my short fiction, essays, book reviews, and other journalism has been published (or is forthcoming) in The New York Times, Narrative Magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Virginia Quarterly Review, and has been supported with grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fulbright Foundation.

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“The Wheat Sheaf Penny,” Virginia Quarterly Review (Winter, 2027).

“Morning,” in Ground/work2 Clark Art Institute catalog, ed. Glenn Adamson (Summer, 2025). 

“Light’s Very Source”: A New Collection of Poems Meditates On How Art Reframes Daily Life, review of Jessica Fisher’s poetry collection Daywork, in Dialog & New Directions. (Spring, 2024).

“The Crossing Guard,” Narrative Magazine. (Winter, 2021). Reprinted in Walking the Line: An Anthology of Parkinson’s Writing (Bellevue Review & Rattapallax Magazine, Spring 2021).

“My Mother’s Marathons,” Narrative Magazine. (Spring, 2020).

“The Thomas Cantor,” Narrative Magazine. (Winter, 2016).

“Hunting for Looted Art in Paris,” The New York Times (11/17/10).

“Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife by Francine Prose,” San Francisco Chronicle (10/11/09).

Pictures at an Exhibition, (Alfred A. Knopf, 2009; Vintage, 2010). 

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