Sarah Braunstein's new novel, Bad Animals, was published by W. W. Norton in March 2024 and described by Claire Luchette in the New York Times Book Review as  "...a red-hot poker that skewers the limits of the white imagination…[A] sharp-witted, ravishing novel.” Sarah is also the author of The Sweet Relief of Missing Children (W. W. Norton), winner of the 2012 Maine Literary Award for Fiction. The novel was a finalist for the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction and was an Oprah Magazine Top Ten Pick of the Month. Bitch magazine said it's a novel "akin to the film Magnolia (if Saul Bellow had written the novelization)."

Her short stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Playboy, The Harvard Review, The Cincinnati Review, AGNI, Ploughshares, The Sun, Nylon Magazine, The Nervous Breakdown, and in other publications. She co-wrote a play, String Theory: Three Greek Myths Woven Together, with Michael Barakiva and Amy Boyce Holtcamp.

Sarah has been the recipient of a “5 Under 35” award from the National Book Foundation and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. For several years she served on the National Selection Panel of the National YoungArts Foundation. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and an MSW from Smith College School for Social Work. She is associate professor of English and creative writing at Colby College.