Sandra Thompson

Sandra Thompson, an acute observer of contemporary relationships, chronicles the interior life of women with haunting understatement and unflinching candor.

Her publishing career began in New York at Magazine Management Company, where she edited, True Secrets, a confessions magazine, and wrote stories with titles like "Shocked when I Discovered My Husband Was One of the Girls at the Office!"

"Close-Ups," winner of ithe Flannery O'Connor Award, was a New York Times New & Notable selection. "Wild Bananas (Atlantic Monthly Press), was called by the San Francisco Chronicle "acerbic and raucously funny...an impressive novelistic debut."

As an editor, writer and columnist for the St. Petersburg Times, she was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. A series she directed, "A Gift Abandoned," about a woman who left her baby in a VCR box beside a dumpster, won the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing.

She has recently completed a memoir, "Home Avenue," that traces her mother's life from a small railroad town on the Mississippi to the "Mad Men" suburbs of the 1950s and 60s -- a privileged life of Girls Scouts, country clubs, alcoholism and wife beating. She is finishing a novel, "Below the Fold," that takes place in a 1990s newsroom when newspapers were still sexy.

She received a B.A. from Ohio Wesleyan University, which awarded her a Distinguished Achievement Citation in 2010, and MFA in Creative Writing from Brooklyn College.

A native of Chicago and longtime resident of Brooklyn, she lives with her husband in Tampa, Florida.