ABOUT SARAH
From Wide Skies to the Playa: A Life Lived Between Worlds
Sarah Marshall is a lifelong seeker shaped as much by landscape as by people. Born in Hawaii and raised in the Sierra Nevada foothills, her early years were marked by wide skies, deep forests, and regular visits to the Black Hills of South Dakota and Wyoming, where she lived and worked as a young adult. These places instilled an enduring reverence for nature, silence, and the subtle intelligence of land. They also seeded a restlessness that would become a defining trait: an ever-present curiosity about how people live, believe, build meaning, and find belonging.
That curiosity has carried her across six continents; not as a collector of destinations but as a listener, participant, and student of culture. She has lived and worked among many communities, learning to navigate differences with humility, adaptability, and respect. These experiences inform her writing deeply, particularly her attention to liminal spaces, chosen families, and moments of transformation that occur far from the center of conventional life.
Sarah's inner life is grounded in a longstanding personal spiritual practice, complemented by decades of study in martial arts, yoga, and dance. Movement has always been a language for her; a way of understanding discipline, surrender, embodiment, and connection beyond words.
These practices shape both her worldview and her prose, which carries a physical, sensory awareness of the body moving through space, effort, and change.
She has participated in the Burning Man event more than twenty times, an experience that profoundly influenced her understanding of community, impermanence, creative devotion, and the tension between structure and freedom. The desert, the playa, and the temporary city that rises there are not merely settings in her work but living systems she knows intimately through years of contribution, leadership, and return.
Before becoming a novelist, Sarah served in the United States Navy and later built a career optimizing operations for growing organizations; work that taught her how systems shape human behavior and how culture determines what becomes possible.
Throughout her life she has moved between worlds that rarely intersect: military and mystic, engineer and artist, strategist and wanderer. Writing has become the place where these threads are allowed to speak to one another.
She currently lives both close to nature and metropolis, still traveling when the road calls, still practicing, still asking questions that refuse easy answers. She is married and has an adult daughter, whose art adorns the novel.
Playa Dust in My Soul emerges from decades of lived experience, patient observation, and a belief that transformation is not an event but a practice.