Sarah Menkedick

Sarah Menkedick is the founder of Vela. She is a writer, editor, and perpetual traveler who always seems to wind up in Oaxaca, Mexico. She recently graduated from the MFA program at The University of Pittsburgh, where she taught creative writing. Before returning to the U.S. for graduate school, she spent six years living, teaching, and traveling abroad. Her work has been published on Amazon’s Kindle Singles, The Common, World Hum, Perceptive Travel, qarrtsiluni and a number of other online and print publications. Her story The Revolution was anthologized in The Best Women’s Travel Writing Volume 9. She was a summer 2011 intern at Harper’s Magazine and the 2012 winner of a Walter Rumsey Marvin Grant for a writer under 30. She is currently at work on a book of narrative nonfiction about return migration and the annual village fiestas in Oaxaca’s Sierra Norte. Contact her at Sarah (at) Velamag.com.


Stories by Sarah:

  • Waiting to Be

    [caption id="attachment_3132" align="aligncenter" width="650"] Photo: ..Read more

  • Backpackers in Paradise

    Our minibus is whisking us around flash cards of local color. The Waterfall. The Woman Walking on the Dusty Roadside. The Sulking Men on Motorbikes. The Village Store called “Christo!” The Kids Cl..Read more

  • The Rider’s Prayer

    How does a human being, or an animal, become God? Through the spontaneous will of self-sacrifice, or through suffering. -Dominique Fournier Originally, the goal was to ride the bull to ..Read more

  • A Personal Geography of Fear

    China, 2007 The KFC outside Beijing West Train Station. People sleeping arms akimbo on tables in the crush. Migrant boys' hipster haircuts sprawled like slaughtered hedgehogs atop ..Read more

  • Touring the Revolution

    The green hills from which the Zapatistas descended to take San Cristóbal nearly twenty years earlier looked wet and blurred outside the windows in the rain. After the parched Oaxacan isthmus and cla..Read more

  • A Year of Vela

    Today, September 6, 2012, we at Vela celebrate the first anniversary of the magazine.  There is much to come, but before we get to all of that, we offer these six short retrospectives on ho..Read more

  • The Goat Slaughter

    My first thought was, I never thought blood was really so red. It looked like red paint, a Hollywood prop, thick and gloopy and nearly fluorescent. It looked so bright and alive that I strugg..Read more

  • Refuge in Shroom Country

    When Ella was 14, she asked her Lutheran pastor if he believed in God. Ella’s skepticism of organized religion had been growing, and after her confirmation she decided to confront her pastor about i..Read more

  • A Letter to My Thirties

    Dear Thirties, You are a centrifugal force to be reckoned with: this, I concede from the outset. My twenties, inaugurated at a Madison bar with a fake ID, a naïve rapture at the eloquence of Histo..Read more

  • Proof of Extreme Hardship

    I was almost there, barreling along I-54 through the valleys where the New Mexican plateau drops and the land pours a deep, scarred red around mountains and dry riverbeds. The sky was electric with li..Read more

  • Down and Out in West Texas

    We were checking in when a woman came storming out of her room to the desk and said, “There’s shit on them sheets.” The South Indian manager sighed with unmasked irritation but, true to lo..Read more

  • The Revolution

    [caption id="attachment_2578" align="alignright" width="237"] "The Revolution" is a 2013 SOLAS Best Travel Writing Awards S..Read more

  • Written by Women

    Try this with The Best Magazine Articles Ever: Go down the list, and say out loud to yourself the gender of each writer as you go. Yo..Read more