Sarah Rosenthal is the author of Estelle Meaning Star (Chax, 2024), Lizard (Chax, 2016), and Manhatten (Spuyten Duyvil, 2009) as well as two books in collaboration with Valerie Witte: One Thing Follows Another: Experiments in Dance, Art, and Life Through the Lens of Simone Forti and Yvonne Rainer (punctum, 2025) and The Grass Is Greener When the Sun Is Yellow (The Operating System, 2019). Her chapbooks include we could hang a radical panel of light (Drop Leaf, 2022), Fire and Flood (above/ground, 2021), Estelle Meaning Star (above/ground, 2014), disperse (Dusie, 2014), The Animal (in collaboration with artist Amy Fung-yi Lee, Dusie, 2011), How I Wrote This Story (Margin to Margin, 2001), sitings (a+bend, 2000), and not-chicago (Melodeon, 1998). She edited A Community Writing Itself: Conversations with Vanguard Writers of the Bay Area (Dalkey Archive, 2010).

Her poetry has appeared in journals such as Elderly, Dream Pop, Miracle Monocle, All the Sins, Eleven Eleven, Sidebrow, Zen Monster, Otoliths, eccolinguistics, textsound, and Little Red Leaves, and is anthologized in The Beautiful: Poets Reimagine a Nation (Gualala Arts, 2022), Kindergarde: Avant-garde Poems, Plays, and Stories for Children (Black Radish, 2013), Building is a Process / Light is an Element: essays and excursions for Myung Mi Kim (P-Queue, 2008), Bay Poetics (Faux, 2006), The Other Side of the Postcard (City Lights, 2004), and hinge (Crack, 2002). Her essays and interviews have appeared in journals such as Jacket, Denver Quarterly, Rain Taxi, New American Writing, and How2. Her chapbook manuscript How Will You Move: Including All of Us in the Dance was a 2020 Gold Line Press Chapbook Finalist. Her film We Agree on the Sun, made in collaboration with Ayana Yonesaka-Ruiz, Jonah Belsky, and Ames Tierney, includes excerpts from How Will You Move; it has received accolades from numerous film festivals, including Best Experimental Short, Berlin Independent Film Festival; Winner, Dance Short, Rotterdam Independent Film Festival; and Best Experimental Short, Dubai Indie Film Festival. A second collaborative film, Lizard Song Cycle, has screened at the Art of Brooklyn Film Festival, the San Francisco Dance Film Festival, the Cadence Video Poetry Festival, Festival Angaelica, the Inshadow Screendance Festival of Lisbon, and the Phoenix Film Festival.

Rosenthal is the recipient of the Leo Litwak Fiction Award, a Creative Capacity Innovation Grant, a San Francisco Education Fund Grant, and grant-supported writing residencies at This Will Take Time, Hambidge, New York Mills, Vermont Studio Center, Soul Mountain, and Ragdale. From 2009–2011 she was an Affiliate Artist at Headlands Center for the Arts. From 2012 to 2023 she served on the California Book Awards poetry jury.