Sarah Hitchcock Yerkes was born in 1918 in Portland, Oregon, where her father had been sent to remove giant spruce trees from the Northwest forests to make WWI airplane propellers. Once the war ended, the family returned to their home in Cleveland, where Sarah grew up. Sarah studied at the Boston Museum School, the Cambridge School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, and Harvard's Graduate School of Design, and was one of the first women to complete a degree in architecture from Harvard. Since 1945, Sarah has lived in Washington DC. In addition to her professional life as a landscape architect and sculptor, she was a student, a trustee for over fifteen years, and interim dean at the Corcoran Galleries and Museum. In her mid-nineties, Sarah turned seriously to poetry when she joined a poetry workshop at her retirement community, Ingleside at Rock Creek. She is mother to three, grandmother to nine, and great grandmother to thirteen children.