Originally from Austin, Texas, Sativa holds an MFA in creative writing from New York University, where she received a Veterans Writing Workshop fellowship, taught undergraduate creative writing, and served as fiction co-editor for Washington Square Review. In media, Sativa has worked as a co-producer on a nationally broadcast PBS documentary series (Unnatural Causes), an outreach producer for a war crimes tribunal in Sierra Leone, and a narrative strategies advisor for tribunal public outreach in Cambodia. A DuPont Columbia Award winner and John Steinbeck Award for Fiction finalist, Sativa now teaches in the English department at Napa Valley College and plays original songs in and around Napa, California. Her creative and academic work has appeared in The Threepenny Review, TriQuarterly, Rattle, Joyland, The International Journal of Transitional Justice, and elsewhere.