Sarah Webster was born in Nashville, Tennessee to Thomas Webster and Mayme Louise Storey Webster. Showing an interest in poetry, she began writing as a high school student. Intellectually adroit and talented, Webster was accepted to and attended Spelman College. She didn't graduate. Instead, she returned to Nashville, Tennessee where she graduated from Fisk University. There she studied poetry under Arna Bontemps. She then married Cyril Fabio, a dental student who later graduated from the historically BlackMeharry Medical College. She then changed her surname to Fabio. Upon her husband's graduation from dental school, he enlisted in the military, which greatly delayed Fabio's graduate education. She had 3 children while her husband was stationed in various locations across America. When they were stationed in Nashville, Fabio enrolled in graduate school; but then her husband was deployed to Germany and Fabio was forced to delay her studies yet again. During her time in Germany she had another child, born in 1954, her fourth and finally, when they moved back to the Wichita, Kansas US the fifth child, born in 1956.
Fabio's time at Merritt College enabled Fabio to expand upon her poetry, combining western styles with Black narrative and realism. She read her poetry at the First World Festival of Negro Art in Dakar, Senegal, in 1966. Upon her return, she began lecturing at the California College of Arts and Crafts and the University of California, Berkeley. There, she worked to create their first Black Studies department. She wrote several collections including poetry and prose. Fabio also performed poetic recordings. Her records, and the entire Folkways collection, are found in the "Smithsonian Folkway" collection online. She published an anthology in 1966. Her seven-volume series Rainbow Signs is considered one of her most impressive works.
Fabio divorced her husband in 1972. She then accepted a faculty position at Oberlin College until 1974. While pursuing her PhD in American and African Studies at the University of Iowa in 1976 and whilst teaching at the University of Wisconsin she was diagnosed with colon cancer. Fabio spent her last two years with her oldest daughter born in 1949, and died at the age of 51 on November 7, 1979.
Legacy
Cheryl Fabio, Fabio's daughter produced the documentary film of Fabio's life and work Rainbow Black: Poet Sarah W. Fabio as her MA thesis in communications at Stanford University in 1976. In 2012, The Black Film Center at Indiana University was awarded a preservation grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation to remaster and preserve the film.
