The Free Library

Core Knowledge Foundation

Sara Holdren

Author

Sara Holdren

About Sara Holdren

Sara Holdren directs plays, writes about theater, and loves to bike, bake, garden, and spoil her two beloved cats. She first learned about Eleanor of Aquitaine when she was in fourth grade and discovered a book by E. L. Konigsburg called A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver. She was immediately fascinated by this smart, courageous queen and still is to this day. Sara grew up in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia, where she loved reading fantastical adventure stories and making up some of her own to act out with help from her sister and the dress-up box. She still loves telling stories—she’s especially fond of Shakespeare’s plays, and she and her partner, a fiction writer, are currently co-writing a fantasy trilogy about the teenage daughter of Macbeth.

Sara lives just outside of New York City, where she works as a director and the theater critic for New York Magazine. She has a four-year-old sourdough starter named Serafina, and she once rode her bike 3,865 miles across the country, from Virginia Beach all the way to Florence, Oregon. She has no idea how many jars of peanut butter she consumed during that time. Many.

Fun Facts

  • Sara Holdren is a theater critic, director, teacher, and writer.
  • She was a 2024–2025 Pulitzer Prize finalist for Criticism and has won the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism.
  • She bicycled 3,900 miles across the United States with her partner, writer Beau Gambold.