After 30 years in the San Francisco Bay Area, she now lives in the Hudson Valley in upstate New York, where she works full time as a hospice nurse. She has a 30+ year publishing history on both sides of the Atlantic, including seven collections of poetry, a collection of short stories, and a novel.
Her work has been widely anthologized and published in magazines and journals. In 2002, she was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She has taken part in numerous festivals and shows, such as the 2003 San Francisco International Poetry Festival, the 2006 Dublin Writers’ Festival, and the 2012 International Mexican Poetry Festival. In 2010, fifteen of her poems were anthologized in Harvard University Press's An Anthology of Modern Irish Poetry. In 2011, she was nominated for the Irish Times Poetry Now award, alongside Seamus Heaney.
^McCracken, Kathleen (1 January 1989). "Review of Home Movie Nights, ; Penn, Sara Berkeley". The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies. 15 (2): 126–130. doi:10.2307/25512798. JSTOR25512798.