Sandra Thompson

Sandra Thompson is an acute observer of contemporary relationships who writes with haunting understatement and unflinching candor. She has chronicled the interior life of women in novels, short stories, essays and memoir.

Her short story collection, Close-Ups, winner of ithe Flannery O'Connor Award, “is a deft and vivid account of the emotional stages in a woman’s life.” (The Nation.) Wild Bananas, published by Atlantic Monthly Press, “a sad/​funny first novel of real pathos and skill,” (Kirkus Reviews) is the story of a brief failed young marriage.

As an editor, writer and columnist for the St. Petersburg Times, Thompson was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and directed a series about a woman who abandoned her baby in a VCR box that won the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing.

She has recently completed "Dot, a Life," a biography/​memoir of her mother, born in 1918 in Savanna, Illinois, a railroad town on the Mississippi. A vivacious woman sizzling with life, Dot was also an alcoholic and battered wife. With probing curiosity, Thompson explores a life cut short by alcohol -- the smooth surface of success and the family horror show that played beneath it.


Thompson’s work has appeared in anthologies, magazines and newspapers including the New York Times. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Brooklyn College where she studied with Jonathan Baumbach. She has taught master classes and fiction writing workshops on the graduate level at University of South Florida and at New College.

Sandra Thompson was born in Chicago. She received her B. A. from Ohio Wesleyan University, where she received a Distinguished Alumni award in May, 2010. Her publishing career began in New York at True Secrets, a confessions magazine, where she wrote stories with titles like “Shocked when I Discovered My Husband Was One of the Girls at the Office!”

She lives in Tampa, Florida, with her husband Chris Sherman, a food and wine writer. Her daughter, Alex, is a teacher of special needs children in New York City.