Robyn Sarah was born in New York City to Canadian parents, and has lived for most of her life in Montreal. Her poetry began appearing in Canadian literary magazines in the early 1970s, while she completed studies in philosophy at McGill University and music at the Conservatoire du Québec. The author of several previous poetry collections and two collections of short stories, she is also an essayist whose writing has appeared on both sides of the border in such publications as The Threepenny Review, New England Review, Books in Canada, and The New Quarterly.

About A Day's Grace:

"This is a voice that will not be distracted from its grave reading of the world's news. What, no cool poses, antic sidesteps, adorable whimsies? Never mind, lots of those elsewhere. Instead, a poem dated November 11 which begins 'War has a long wake'; a poem for the forgotten in their high hospital rooms ('I think of you up there,/ remote behind your allocated pane ...'); and poems which will outlast most others that might come your way because of an elegant simile ('The birds twist up again/ like a scarf of black chiffon') or a genius of a verb ('the bell of a French horn...gleams a reply.') 'Levels' ends like this: 'Sunset. It is the hour when hospital windows / beam gold into the eyes / of runners on the upper avenues.' Mythic, I think."
—Don Coles

"So assured and musical is the hand that shaped them that these poems tend to memorize themselves, as though they had always formed part of our experience."
—Eric Ormsby