About

SARAH DOHRMANN, MFA, LMSW, is a psychotherapist, a literary nonfiction writer, and a teacher of writing.

She is currently a psychotherapist at Brooklyn Somatic Therapy where she integrates somatic approaches and a warm, relational style to invite clients in exploring and discovering what stories they unconsciously hold. She’s a Level IV Clinical Fellowship trainee at the Gestalt Associates for Psychotherapy (GAP) and an EMDRIA-trained EMDR practitioner treating individuals who have experienced complex and/or acute traumas. In addition to working with individuals at Brooklyn Somatic Therapy and in GAP’s low-fee clinic, Sarah has also worked with survivors of interpersonal and gender-based violence in the Domestic Violence Aftercare Program at University Settlement, LGBTQIA+ young adults living in shelter at Trinity Place Shelter, mothers who have transitioned out of foster care and are at risk of losing their own children to care at Delgracia Corp., and terminally ill children and their caregivers at Mount Sinai Kravis Children’s Hospital. Sarah graduated with honors from the Silberman School of Social Work at CUNY–Hunter College.

Her writing has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, Tin House Magazine, The Iowa Review, New York, Bustle, Condé Nast Traveler, and the New York Observer, among others. A former Fulbright grantee (Morocco), Sarah has also received a number of writing grants and awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Jerome Foundation, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (Workspace), Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference (Scholar), the Aspen Writers’ Foundation (Aspen Words), and the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University (Dorothea Lange–Paul Taylor Prize), among others. Sarah received her MFA from the Graduate Writing Program at Sarah Lawrence College.

She has served as a part-time professor of writing in Liberal Studies at New York University since 2016 and in 2024 she was awarded the Liberal Studies Excellence in Teaching Award. She has previously taught writing in the Language & Thinking Program at Bard College, at the Writing Institute at Sarah Lawrence College, and with Teachers & Writers Collaborative (T&W) as a longtime writer in NYC schools and community sites. Sarah now proudly serves on T&W’s Board of Directors.

In 2017, Sarah began leading personal nonfiction writing workshops in her home and online. The workshops, called DIVING INTO THE WRECK based on Adrienne Rich’s poem of the same name, urge writers to write into the difference between “the wreck” and “the story of the wreck”. Many former participants in her DIVING workshops have published their work widely, including in such journals and publications as The New York Times, The Sun, and Longreads, as well as in book form, including the award-winning memoirs What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma by Stephanie Foo and The Black Period: On Personhood, Race, and Origin by Hafizah Geter.

Sarah’s DIVING INTO THE WRECK writing workshops have now transformed into expressive writing groups that draw from her work as a psychotherapist and her lifelong devotion to writing as a singular form of self-discovery, fostering a communal space where the solitary act of writing becomes a shared journey of reclamation, proving that when we brave the depths of our stories together, the collective word has the power to illuminate what isolation has obscured. You can read more about DIVING INTO THE WRECK: Expressive Writing here.