Sarah Ann Hafner, 55, died on Saturday, December 4, 2010, at the Franklin Baystate Medical Center in Greenfield, MA, where she was treated for a rare and sudden intestinal illness. She was a resident, with her husband of nearly fourteen years, John F. Perry, of Northfield, MA.
Ms. Hafner was born in Rochester, N.Y., in 1955, to Susan Zacharias and the late Everett M. Hafner, a physicist and musician who was founding Dean of Science and Mathematics at Hampshire College.
She was educated at Amherst Regional High School, where she was in the class of 1973. While still in High School she took classes at Amherst College, and attended Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, N.Y.
Ms. Hafner was a renowned maker of highly distinctive artistic quilts, and she was also an author of several books, including Nice Girls Don’t Drink: Stories of Recovery and The Elements of Style, A Novel. She had several works of both fiction and nonfiction in progress at the time of her death.
Her quilts have been exhibited at juried crafts shows in New York City, Westchester County, and Baltimore, Maryland to name a few. Her later works reflect her fascination with textiles and tie-dye traditions from sources in Asia and Africa. Examples can be viewed at https://www.sarahhafner.com/.
Ms. Hafner is survived by her husband, John; her mother, Susie, her sister, Katie Hafner, and her niece, Zoe Lyon, all of San Francisco; her aunt and uncle, Johanna Zacharias and Herbert L. Kessler, of Baltimore. Her maternal grandparents were the M.I.T. physicist, Jerrold R. Zacharias, and Leona Zacharias, a research biologist at Harvard.