On August 11, 1836, Sarah Morgan Bryan was born in Lexington, Kentucky, the daughter of Southern gentry. After her mother's death in 1844, she lived with different family members before entering Henry Female College in a four-year general degree program in 1855. She married a young poet, John James Piatt, on June 18, 1861, and followed him to Washington and eventually over to Ireland in his lifelong career in the US civil service. They had seven children. Sarah began publishing poems in 1854. They appeared in Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Scribner's, and many other journals, and she brought out more than sixteen volumes of verse. Sarah knew most contemporary American and Irish poets, including Longfellow, Whitman, and W. B. Yeats. She died in Caldwell, New Jersey, in 1919, two years after the death of her husband.

• Piatt, Sarah Morgan Bryan. The Nests at Washington and Other Poems. New York and London: Samson Low and Son, 1864.
• --. A Woman's Poems. Boston: James R. Osgood, 1871.
• --. A Voyage to the Fortunate Isles. Boston: James R. Osgood, 1874.
• --. That New World and Other Poems. Boston: James R. Osgood, 1877.
• --. Poems in Company with Children. Boston: D.Lothrop, 1877.
• --. Dramatic Persons and Moods, with other new poems. Boston: Houghton, Osgood, 1879.
• --. A Book About Baby. Boston: D, Lothrop, 1882.
• --. An Irish Garland. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1885.
• --. In Primrose Time: a new Irish garland. New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1886.
• --. Select Poems. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1886.
• --. The Children Out-of-Doors by Two in One House. Cincinatti: Robert Clarke, 1887.
• --. Child's-World Ballads. Cincinatti: Robert Clarke, 1887.
• --. The Witch in the Glass. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1889.
• --. An Irish Wild-flower. New York: Frederick Stokes, 1891.
• --. An Enchanted Castle and Other Poems: Pictures, Portraits, and People in Ireland. London: Longman's Green, 1893.
• --. Poems. New York: Longman's Green, 1894.
• --. Cmplete Poems. 2 vols. London: Longman's Green, 1894.
• --. A Gift of Tears. Cincinatti: Western Literary, 1906.