Born and raised in Mississippi, in Natchez and along the Gulf Coast, with much time spent with family in Wilkinson County and Concordia and Orleans Parish, Selah Saterstrom now makes her home in the Pacific Northwest on Vashon Island with her wife, writer and book designer HR Hegnauer, their daughter, and an elderly, cranky dog.

She attended Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi, where she earned a Bachelor of Arts in Religious Studies, under the influential mentorship of Dr. Mark Ledbetter. Her academic pursuits led her to the University of Glasgow, where she earned her Master of Philosophy in Theology and Literature. Here, under the guidance of Dr. David Jasper, she studied feminist Hermeneutics, an inquiry that would energize her future work. She went on to earn a Master of Fine Arts degree from Goddard College where she studied the novel with Rebecca Brown and Michael Klein, both of whom transformed Selah’s understanding of writing.

In 2006 she moved to Denver, Colorado where she became a Professor in the Department of English and Literary Arts at the University of Denver and where she also served on faculty in the Department of Gender and Women Studies. At the University of Denver she taught classes in contemporary hermeneutics, feminist autotheory, Divinatory Poetics, narrative theory, the philosophy of literature, and film studies. In her eighteen year tenure, she achieved the rank of Full Professor and served as Director of Creative Writing for seven years in the undergraduate and doctoral programs. During this time she was ordained into priesthood, and though she does not align with any institutional iteration of Christianity, community-based ritual, ceremonial happenings, and installations continue to be important to her practice.

Upon her arrival in Denver in 2006, Selah met legendary poet, activist, visionary and co-founder of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, Anne Waldman, who encouraged her to offer workshops in Divinatory Poetics during the Naropa Summer Writing Program, where Selah has since offered many talks and workshops, developing a strong Divinatory Poetics theory and curriculum. Selah has shared her knowledge about creative writing and Divinatory Poetics all around the world, from Iceland to South Africa, in universities and colleges and museums—in monasteries, schools, and community centers. In addition to her teaching roles, she works as a consultant, lending her insights and strategies to a variety of organizations and institutions seeking to (re)vision their mission and values.

Selah is the author of five books including three novels, which stand alone and, for the curious reader, also form a trilogy centering generations of the same family living in the rural South. Regarding The Pink Institution (Coffee House Press, 2004), HuffPost said, “Saterstrom writes with a poet’s economy and eye for visceral detail, collapsing into a mere 140 pages a four-generation history of a Southern family bedeviled by alcoholism, poverty, racism, violence, and mental illness. Her spareness is a mercy. The story she tells is brutal, almost impossible to take; at the same time, her exquisite, cut-to-the-quick language makes this book impossible to put down.”

The narrator of The Pink Institution continues her journey in Selah’s second novel, The Meat and Spirit Plan (Coffee House Press, 2007), about which writer Katherine Dunn said, “The Meat and Spirit Plan is ferocious and dazzling, the work of a savage poet. Every scene is a hard polished gem of raunch and revelation. Strung together they build a force of piercing tenderness.” Regarding The Meat and Spirit Plan Rikki Ducornet wrote, “It is simultaneously unspeakably funny and devastating—the way Artaud is funny and devastating. It is also wildly entertaining, exultant, and sublime—it's razors tempered with lucency.”

In her third novel, Slab: On that On that Hallelujah Day when Tiger & Preacher Meet (Coffee House Press, 2015), Selah enters the post-Katrina landscape of the poor, rural South to which the Los Angeles Review responded: “In her latest novel Selah Saterstrom confirms her status as one of America’s premier narrative archaeologists.” Slab was adapted for the stage by Gleason Bauer and Emily K. Harrison of Square Product Theatre, opening in July of 2014 at the ATLAS in Boulder, Colorado and was the winner of the 2014 True West Award for Outstanding Direction and Scenic Design and was a nominee for the 2015 Colorado Theatre Guild Henry Award for Best New Play.

Saterstrom’s two books of nonfiction include the award-winning Ideal Suggestions: Essays in in Divinatory Poetics (Essay Press, 2017), selected by K Prevallet, which has garnered widespread critical acclaim. The Atticus Review sums up the book in this way: “Ideal Suggestions dives deep into the crosscurrents of divination, narrative, and writing. In a series of lyric essays and accompanying notes on process, Saterstrom weaves together a radical approach to literary production and reception; divining is reading is writing is reading, a call to embrace “uncertainty, simultaneity, contradiction, paradox, and parable.”

Her most recent book, Rancher (Burrow Press, 2021), is a meditation on sexual assault, narrative construction, and the role of community in trauma and recovery, and is juxtaposed with the evocative images of artist H.C. Dunaway Smith. Speaking with Abby Haggler and Julia Cohen about the sort of storytelling dynamic that informed the writing of Rancher: “That is how it was [growing up in rural Mississippi]—everything was shot through with so many, to use Kathleen Stewart’s phrase, animated strands of potential. The uncanny drift in which we were situated vibrated; the needle would skip across the surface of the record. Things were relational. Categories were punctured. As I experienced it, in every space, the conditions were hospitable to narrative because in every space there was the potential for emergence and the presence of juxtaposition, two conditions favored by both the disaster and the oracle.”

Selah's forthcoming novel, The Delirium of Negation, takes place in an Underworld convent: it is very funny and f*cking scary. She is currently completing a long book on the theory and application of Divination and Divinatory Poetics, as well as a collection of essays that all, in some way, seem to reference God and the county dump. 

Selah is a celebrated diviner who practices a Southern family-style of card reading. At the core of her work is the belief that divination possesses formidable capabilities to navigate oppressive structures and unveil profound revelations in the name of generative transformation. Divination, for Selah, is an inseparable and essential aspect of her mission to serve others. In 2020, these beliefs materialized in the creation of Four Queens, a collaborative venture with poet, diviner, performer, and activist, Kristen E. Nelson, aimed at fostering candid conversations guided by the cards and the education and upliftment of all people, but especially the feminists and queers.