Sara NoviÃÂ (born 1987) is an American writer, translator, and professor. NoviÃÂ is also a deaf rights activist who has written about the challenges she faces as a deaf novelist. NoviÃÂ is most known for her debut novel, Girl at War.
NoviÃÂ grew up between the United States and Croatia.
She is a graduate of the MFA program at Columbia University, where she studied fiction and literary translation.
NoviÃÂ has translated poems by Bosnian writer Izet SarajliÃÂ. NoviÃÂ was awarded the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize in 2013 for her translation of SarajliÃÂ's poem "After I Was Wounded". In 2014, NoviÃÂ was awarded a Travel Fellowship by the American Literary Translators Association.
Her debut novel, Girl at War, tells the story of Ana JuriÃÂ, a ten-year-old girl whose life is upended by the civil war that resulted in the dissolution of Yugoslavia. The novel was an Alex Award recipient in 2016. It was longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction and shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
In 2019, she released the nonfiction project America is Immigrants, illustrated by Alison Kolesar. It was published by Penguin Random House as an e-book.
NoviÃÂ's second book True Biz was released in 2022. The book follows protagonist Charlie to the River Valley School for the Deaf, where she deals with a faulty cochlear implant and meets other deaf people for the first time in her life. The book was a Reese's Book Club pick and was reviewed as "moving, fast-paced and spirited [...] but also skillfully educational" by The New York Times. The novel integrates excerpts from Wikipedia pages and other sources to offer educational content about American Sign Language and Deaf culture and history.
She is a fiction editor at Blunderbuss Magazine and serves as the founding editor of the deaf rights blog Redeafined.
NoviÃÂ teaches creative writing and Deaf studies at Emerson College and Stockton University.
NoviÃÂ uses they and she pronouns. She lives in Philadelphia.