About Sara

About Sara Madden

She writes the stories that might otherwise disappear.

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Sara Madden is an author, historian, anthropologist, archaeologist, and storyteller whose work explores the people, histories, and experiences too easily overlooked.

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Across historical nonfiction, adult and young adult fiction, children's literature, and reimagined fairy tales, her books return again and again to the same questions: Who gets remembered? Who gets left out? And what changes when we finally tell the rest of the story?

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Her nonfiction includes the Hidden Histories collections, which uncover the women, caretakers, healers, builders, cultural guardians, and ordinary people whose lives shaped history even when their names rarely entered the traditional record. Drawing from anthropology, archaeology, military history, material culture, and archival research, Sara approaches history not simply as a record of what happened, but as a collection of human lives worth recovering.

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That same curiosity runs through her fiction.

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Her young adult and adult novels weave history, folklore, mystery, and forgotten voices into stories about identity, belonging, courage, and memory. Her Rewoven Fairytales take familiar stories and place them into historical worlds where the people at the margins become central to the narrative.

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And for her youngest readers, Sara writes books that celebrate difference, curiosity, kindness, imagination, and the wonderfully unexpected ways children find their place in the world.

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Different shelves. Different readers. The same belief:

Stories can restore what the world has overlooked.

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The Historian Behind the Stories

Sara holds dual degrees in anthropology (with a concentration in environmental sustainability) and history (with a concentration in military) and is completing a master's degree in archaeology and heritage through the University of Leicester.

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Her academic interests include material culture, memory, museum interpretation, overlooked histories, conflict and humanitarian history, and the ways communities preserve—and sometimes lose—the stories of the people who came before them.

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Her work outside the page has included museum interpretation and volunteer service in humanitarian education, youth engagement, refugee mentorship, and family-restoration work.

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These experiences continually remind her that history is never merely about dates, wars, institutions, or famous names.

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It is about people.

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The ones who carried the wounded.
The ones who buried the dead.
The ones who kept the stories.
The ones who challenged the rules.
The ones who survived.

And the ones whose names we are still trying to recover.

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Beyond the Books

Sara grew up on California's Central Coast in Orcutt, surrounded by strawberry fields, family trips to Pismo Beach, Avila Beach, Morro Bay, and Montaña de Oro—and cinnamon cake donuts from her family's Tan Top Bakery.

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Today, she lives in Utah with her spouse and an assortment of dogs, orchids, backyard squirrels, and other creatures who occasionally behave as though they own the place.

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When she isn't writing or researching, she can usually be found reading, exploring museums, painting, roller skating, collecting vintage typewriters, tending more than thirty rescue orchids, or planning the next place she wants to see.

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She is also dyslexic—which she considers particularly entertaining for someone who decided to build a life around words.

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Most of all, Sara is a mother and grandmother. ​Family sits at the center of her life and, ultimately, at the center of why she writes: because stories are one of the ways we carry people forward.

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Remember the overlooked.
Question the familiar.
Tell the stories that almost disappeared.