Sarah Conover’s interests lie with world traditions of wisdom and spirituality. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in religious studies from the University of Colorado, a degree in education from Gonzaga University, and a Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Eastern Washington University.
She is the founder and editor of the This Little Light of Mine series, a series published by Eastern Washington University Press. The inaugural volume, Kindness: A Treasury of Buddhist Wisdom for Children and Parents, a collection of Buddhist tales, was recommended by Booklist as one of the five best spiritual books for children of 2001, while the second, Ayat Jamilah: Beautiful Signs, was cited by Newsweek as one of the best multicultural books of 2004, and was also the winner of the 2004 Aesop Prize, presented by the American Folklore Society. Ms. Conover was a contributing co-editor of the third book in the series, At Work in Life’s Garden: Writers on the Spiritual Adventure of Parenting, a collection of literary essays on that subject by a wide range of well-known and not-so-well-known writers. Her fourth book in the series, Harmony: A Treasury of Chinese Wisdom for Children and Parents, has just been released.
In addition Ms. Conover is also the coauthor of Daughters of the Desert: Remarkable Women from the Christian, Jewish and Muslim Traditions, published by SkylightPaths Press in 2003.
Her poetry has appeared in Rock and Sling, the Santa Clara Review, Pontoon 10, Floating Bridge Review, and the book, Family Pictures, published by Capital BookFest.
Ms. Conover lives in Spokane, Washington, where she teaches English and radio production. She strives to bring multi-cultural perspectives into classrooms through her writing and through collaborations with other educators around the globe. She was the first grant recipient of the EPA’s Environment Education Department from which she developed Environmentbridge, a year-long interdisciplinary project for high school students in the US and Brazil for presentation at the UN Conference on the Environment in Rio de Janiero; she was the participant of two “Bridge” conferences hosted by the US State Department and iEARN (International and Educational Resource Network), which brought US teachers to the Middle East to initiate classroom collaborations between students in both regions; she created a media literacy curriculum—Media Mosaic—in conjunction with iEARN and Medialit.org, for educators; she was also the Managing Editor for the Pearl Project, an international on-line news magazine for high school students sponsored by the Daniel Pearl Foundation and iEARN.
Previous to her role in education, she was a senior producer at Internews, an international NGO committed to fostering open media throughout the world. In that role she was the US producer for Agenda for a Small Planet, a series that aired in 33 countries around the globe; and the producer of many public television programs including the National Academy of Science’s The Medical Implications of Nuclear War.