Oral Histories and Other Recordings
Compiler, Professor Elizabeth Renker, The Ohio State University Department of English

Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt (1836-1919), a popular, prolific, and acclaimed poet during her lifetime both in the U.S. and abroad, published more than 600 poems in venues including popular, influential, and well-regarded newspapers; popular and elite magazines; anthologies; periodicals for children; and eighteen books. No firm total number of her poems can be established at this time; the results of this project to date make it clear that more poems remain to be discovered. Others have surely been lost.

Born on a farm in Fayette County, Kentucky into slaveholding families on both her maternal and paternal sides, she began publishing her poems in the 1850s while still a teenager. Two of the most powerful editors of the age, George D. Prentice of the well-known political newspaper The Louisville Daily Journal and Robert E. Bonner of the blockbuster story paper The New York Ledger, published her regularly and brought her work to a wide audience. Her early poems typically appeared under her initials, S.M.B., or under her maiden name, Sallie M. Bryan. In addition to the 86 currently known poems in the Ledger, she also published no fewer than 80 poems in The Louisville Daily Journal and its evening counterpart, The Louisville Evening Bulletin.

In June 1861, just as the Civil War was breaking out, she married John James Piatt ("J.J."), a poet and abolitionist from Ohio. The newlyweds moved to Washington, D.C., where J.J. worked as a government clerk in the Lincoln administration under antislavery firebrand and Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase. Sarah and J.J. and their growing family would live in multiple locations across the coming decades: in Georgetown and D.C.; at West Liberty, Cleves and North Bend, Ohio; in Queenstown, Ireland (now Cobh), where they moved in 1882 for J.J.’s new job as U.S. Consul, Cork; and in Dublin. Upon their return to the U.S. in 1895, the Piatts lived in several locations before they eventually moved back to their home in North Bend, Ohio, in 1898.

Despite her significant body of work and a national and international reputation for half a century, she fell into obscurity upon her death in 1919. At that time, modernist poets were turning against their poetic predecessors for their alleged stodginess, conventionality, and excessive emotion, sometimes called (derogatorily) sentimentality. Sentimental male poets were replaced with alternative male writers like the newly rediscovered Herman Melville, while women were not only minimized but expunged from a newly emergent canon. Piatt was rediscovered in the 1990s by numerous scholars working independently of one another. Since that time, she has quickly gained stature as a major artist.

This site collects interviews with researchers who contributed to the first and second waves of Piatt’s recovery or who are working on topics that illuminate her life and times. It also features recorded readings and responses to individual poems.

Interviews to date:

Dr. Larry R. Michaels, 10 October 2017, conducted by Professor Elizabeth Renker. In 1999, Michaels produced the first edition of selected works by Piatt published since her death in 1919, That New World: Selected Poems of Sarah Piatt, 1861-1911. Dr. Michaels has donated a substantial collection of research notes and Piatt materials, including first editions, to the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library at The Ohio State University. A finding aid for his papers is available at https://library.osu.edu/collections/spec.rare.0222. Book and serial donations may be found in the library catalog through a keyword search on "gift of Larry R. Michaels."

Dr. Paula Bernat Bennett, 9 September 2017, conducted by Professor Elizabeth Renker. In 2001, Bennett produced the first edition of selected works by Piatt published by a university press, Palace-Burner: The Selected Poetry of Sarah Piatt. Dr. Bennett has donated her research materials to the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library (https://library.osu.edu/collections/spec.rare.cms.0116).

Dr. Elizabeth Renker, 27 July 2020, conducted by University Libraries Curator of Modern Literature and Manuscripts, Jolie Braun. Dr. Renker is an Ohio State University English Professor and second-wave Piatt scholar. She discusses her work on the poet, including building on the efforts of first-wave scholars to bring Piatt into the American literary canon, teaching Piatt to undergraduates, writing Piatt's first biography, and collaborating with the Ohio State University Libraries on the Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt Recovery Project.

Dr. Geoffrey D. Smith, 22 January 2021, conducted by Professor Elizabeth Renker. Dr. Smith is Professor Emeritus of The Ohio State University Libraries and the former Head of the Rare Books & Manuscripts Library. He discusses his work as a curator, developing the unit’s Charvat Collection of American Literature and Sarah Piatt holdings, and the evolution of the special collections field over the past 30 years.

Dr. Karen L. Kilcup, 5 March 2021, conducted by Professor Elizabeth Renker. Dr. Kilcup is the Elizabeth Rosenthal Excellence Professor of English, Environmental & Sustainability Studies, and Women’s & Gender Studies at UNC Greensboro. In addition to publishing on topics related to the environment, American poetry and poetics, and children’s poetry, Dr. Kilcup has worked extensively on recovering overlooked or forgotten nineteenth-century American women writers. Her 1997 collection, Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers: An Anthology, included a selection of Sarah Piatt’s poetry and helped reintroduce Piatt to readers after her work had long been out of print.

Margaret Piatt, 27 February 2021, conducted by Professor Elizabeth Renker. A public historian by training, Margaret is the director of Piatt Castle Mac-A-Cheek in West Liberty, Ohio. Margaret is also a descendant of the Piatt family and has done extensive research on the Piatts and worked with Sarah Piatt scholars.

Dr. Pamela Kincheloe, 28 April 2021, conducted by Professor Elizabeth Renker. Dr. Kincheloe is a first-wave scholar of Sarah Piatt teaching at the Rochester Institute of Technology. She discusses working as a research assistant to Piatt scholar Paula Bennett in graduate school; her dissertation on Piatt; her experiences doing archival research; and her time in Ireland researching the Piatt family.

Dr. Bernadette Whelan, 23 August 2021, conducted by Professor Elizabeth Renker. Dr. Whelan is Professor Emeritus in the Department of History at the University of Limerick. Her areas of expertise include women's history, American-Irish diplomatic relations, and the US Consul in Ireland. She discusses J.J. Piatt's position as the US consul to Cork, the Piatt family living as Americans in Queenstown, and Irish politics and culture during the late nineteenth century.

Sean E. Andres, 23 January 2023, conducted by Professor Elizabeth Renker. He is a marketer, a writer, and a former educator who holds a B.S. in secondary English and language arts education (with a focus on women writers during the Civil War) and a Master’s degree in marketing (with a focus on diversity marketing from applied feminist and race theory). He works on an array of public history projects, especially in the Cincinnati area, with a focus on preserving and empowering the voices of historically marginalized populations. His work on Piatt has been published in The New Territory Magazine’s Literary Landscapes and Paideuma, the National Poetry Foundation journal.

Bridget Striker, 13 March 2023, conducted by Professor Elizabeth Renker. Bridget Striker is the Director of the Boone County Borderlands Archive and History Center at the Boone County Public Library in Burlington, KY. An anthropologist and librarian by training, Bridget brings her expertise in archaeology, mapping, and historic preservation into her work on Boone County’s complex history. In this first part of a two-part interview, she discusses the Kentucky relatives of Sarah’s husband, Ohioan John James Piatt. Those relatives were among the white settlers granted large tracts of land along the Ohio River for Revolutionary War service, and Bridget situates them in social networks and enslavement practices of this place and time.

Bridget Striker, 14 March 2023, conducted by Professor Elizabeth Renker. Bridget Striker is the Director of the Boone County Borderlands Archive and History Center at the Boone County Public Library in Burlington, KY. An anthropologist and librarian by training, Bridget brings her expertise in archaeology, mapping, and historic preservation into her work on Boone County’s complex history. In this second part of a two-part interview, she discusses enslavement practices in Boone County, Kentucky; the Kentucky relatives of Sarah’s husband John James Piatt who were enslavers; the existing documentation about the people the Kentucky Piatts enslaved and their efforts to seek their freedom; and the complexities of the lives of enslaved people, especially along the borderlands region of Kentucky, Ohio, and Indiana.

Sean E. Andres, 15 March 2023, Sean Andres reading Sarah Piatt's Poem "If I Had Made the World" aloud and responding to it, recorded in Cincinnati, OH. Professor Elizabeth Renker introduces his reading with a short introductory lecture on the historical context of the poem, recorded in Columbus, OH on 20 September 2023. Andres is a marketer, a writer, and a former educator who holds a B.S. in secondary English and language arts education (with a focus on women writers during the Civil War) and a Master's degree in marketing (with a focus on diversity marketing and applied feminist and race theory). He works on an array of public history projects, especially in the Cincinnati area, centered on preserving and empowering the voices of historically marginalized populations. His work on Piatt has been published in The New Territory Magazine's Literary Landscapes and Paideuma, the National Poetry Foundation journal.

Joe Lockard, 2 February 2024, conducted by Professor Elizabeth Renker. Joe is an associate professor of English at Arizona State University, where he has taught for 21 years. He's a specialist in nineteenth-century American Literature, particularly the literature of U.S. slavery and early African American literature. Joe talks about his groundbreaking research recovering the life and work of abolitionist Mattie Griffith, a young Kentucky poet who shared social circles with Sarah.

Stephanie Burt, 26 September 2025, conducted by Professor Elizabeth Renker. Stephanie Burt is a poet, a literary critic, and a professor of English at Harvard University. A recipient of a 2016 Guggenheim Fellowship, she's the author of many books, including her volume of poems, We Are Mermaids; her award-winning anthology of post-Stonewall queer poetry, Super Gay Poems; and Taylor's Version: The Poetic and Musical Genius of Taylor Swift. The New York Times called her “one of the most influential poetry critics of her generation.” In the first installment of a two-part interview, Stephanie describes how she first encountered Sarah’s poems and why they immediately spoke to her as the work of a distinctive and major writer. She also reads and discusses her gateway poem, “A Lesson in a Picture.” In the second part, Stephanie asks Elizabeth to read and explicate one of Sarah’s little-known poems. Elizabeth reads “Mock Diamonds,” and they break it down stanza by stanza. Stephanie concludes that “Mock Diamonds” is “a poem of our time.”