Sarah de Leeuw holds a Ph.D. in historical-cultural geography and is currently an Associate Professor with the Northern Medical Program at UNBC, the Faculty of Medicine at the University of British Columbia, where she works in medical humanities and the determinants of marginalized peoples' health.

De Leeuw grew up on Vancouver Island and Haida Gwaii (The Queen CharLotte Islands), the lived in Terrace, BC. She earned a BFA from the University of Victoria, after which she spent time teaching English in South Korea. She also worked as a tug boat driver, women's centre coordinator, logging camp cook, and a journalist and correspondent for Connections Magazine and CBC Radio's BC Almanac. She returned to Northern BC after spending four years in Ontario and another year in Arizona as a visiting Fulbright Scholar with the University of Arizona.

Her first book, Unmarked, was published in 2004. Her second, Geographies of a Lover, arrived in Spring 2012 and won the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize for the best book of poetry in British Columbia that year. For two consecutive years, Sarah de Leeuw was honoured in the Creative Nonfiction category of the CBC Literary Awards, winning first place for "Quick-quick. Slow. Slow." in 2010. In 2013, her essay "Soft Shoulder" earned a Western Magazine Gold Award.

She currently divides her time between Prince George and Kelowna, BC.