In Sasha Bailyn's career pursuits, she has turned to various vehicles--literal, in the case of theme park design, and investigative, in the case of journalism--to explore this question. Sasha holds a dual-genre MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. She has a finished nonfiction book (a recent contest finalist), is writing a fairy-tale rewrite novel, and building a lit mag (Inglenook Lit) for magic and memoir.
Publications, Presentations, & Awards
“Fairy Tales and Fluidity in Memoir.” Fairy-Tale Trouble and the Art of Fluidity: Gender, genre, media. Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH). Online, October 2025.
“Memoir as Womb Space,” London Arts-Based Research Centre: Women Who Create Conference. Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge, March 30 2025.
“Review of Snake Sisters and Ghost Daughters,” Marvels & Tales Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies, issue 39.1, 2025. Wayne State University Press.
Wandering Aengus Press Trail to Table Book Award Finalist, 2025
“Toxic Tales: The Craft of Enchantment in Fiction and Memoir.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, 2024
- David G. Hartwell Emerging Scholar Award, Inernational Association for the Fantastic in the Arts, 2024
“Good Old Goat” – Silly Goose Press, 2024
“Anatomy of a Wave” – Open: Journal of Arts and Letters, 2024
“Erasure: How You Were Made” – The Maine Review, 2022
“Rocky Road” – Literary Mama, 2020
“Making Mom Friends is Hard AF” – The Bold Italic, 2019
Admit One
Sasha grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and was drawn to storytelling from an early age. Her shelves were lined with fantasy books, original works of poetry and magical realism, and her bedroom was often taken over by her latest theme park for Playmobil people.
Keep Hands and Feet Inside the Ride
After studying Communications at New York University, Sasha blogged her way into the world of theme park design, building one of the industry’s top news sites, EntertainmentDesigner.com. Mentored by some of the biggest names in an extremely niche industry, she collaborated with the field’s best designers and builders as a concept writer, project coordinator, and later, a business development manager.
Please Exit the Vehicle
Sasha was running a successful industry news site, creating proposals for billion-dollar projects, and helping design the storylines for world-class attractions. But none of this spoke to the emotional complexity of her inner world. She realized that the stories she needed to tell, the ones closing in on her heart, wouldn’t pair well with theme parks. Pregnancy spurred her career as an author, pushing her to reconsider themes of family, parenting, and folklore on a deeper level.
World-Building Continues
After earning a dual-genre (Nonfiction / Fiction) MFA in Creative Writing at the Vermont College of Fine Arts, Sasha carried on doing what she does best: building enchanting spaces. Inglenook Lit is an online literary magazine to connect magically minded readers and writers, a bridge between the literary and the occult. Focusing on speculative genres, magical realism, and memoir, Inglenook explores the unexplainable and the liminal space between fiction and reality.