Sallie Bingham is a writer, teacher, feminist activist, and philanthropist.
Sallie Bingham, 2015 – Photo by Camila Motta
Her short story, “What I Learned From Fat Annie” won the Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize in 2023 and the story “How Daddy Lost His Ear,” from her forthcoming short story collection How Daddy Lost His Ear and Other Stories, received second prize in the 2023 Sean O’Faolain Short Story Competition and was published in the summer 2024 edition of Southword.
In 2022, Sarabande Books published Little Brother: A Memoir, and in 2021, she had two books published: the first a biography of Doris Duke titled The Silver Swan: In Search of Doris Duke from Farrar, Straus and Giroux as well as a collection of short stories and a play titled Treason: A Sallie Bingham Reader also from Sarabande Books. She has published six additional novels, three collections of poetry, numerous plays (produced off-Broadway and regionally), and the well-known family memoir, Passion and Prejudice (Knopf, 1989). For a complete listing of Sallie’s work, visit her bibliography page.
Her short stories have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, New Letters, Plainswoman, Plainsong, Greensboro Review, Negative Capability, The Connecticut Review, and Southwest Review, among others, and have been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, Forty Best Stories from Mademoiselle, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, and The Harvard Advocate Centennial Anthology. She has received fellowships from Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.
Sallie has worked as a book editor for The Courier-Journal in Louisville and has been a director of the National Book Critics Circle. She is founder of the Kentucky Foundation for Women, which published The American Voice, and the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture at Duke University.
She was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky, and currently resides in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Press:
Brief bio:
A long and fruitful career as a writer began in 1960 with the publication of Sallie Bingham’s novel, After Such Knowledge. This was followed by 15 collections of short stories in addition to novels, memoirs and plays, as well as the 2020 biography The Silver Swan: In Search of Doris Duke.
Her latest book, Taken by the Shawnee, is a work of historical fiction published by Turtle Point Press in June of 2024. Her previous memoir, Little Brother, was published by Sarabande Books in 2022. Her short story, “What I Learned From Fat Annie” won the Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize in 2023 and the story “How Daddy Lost His Ear,” from her forthcoming (Fall 2025) short story collection How Daddy Lost His Ear and Other Stories, received second prize in the 2023 Sean O’Faolain Short Story Competition.
She is an active and involved feminist, working for women’s empowerment, who founded the Kentucky Foundation for Women, which gives grants to Kentucky artists and writers who are feminists, The Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture at Duke University, and the Women’s Project and Productions in New York City. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
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Photo credit: Camila Motta
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Turtle Point Press
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Sarabande Books
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Farrar Straus & Giroux