Sally M. Ooms

After 30 years as a print journalist, Sally Ooms traveled around the country interviewing people who had been displaced from their homes and heard how they recreated them. In first person accounts in her book, Finding Home: How Americans Prevail, the formerly displaced and displaced discuss what home means to them. Clue: It is rarely just a physical dwelling and is almost always something deep inside. The stories are touching and uplifting, serving to help people who have been in similar difficulties and to provide tales of triumph for readers who like to hear positive stories in this day and age.

Ooms has lived in 23 places herself, including Barcelona, Spain, and Taos, New Mexico. She has traveled Europe, New Zealand and Australia by motorcycle, been on blues (music) cruises in the Caribbean and taken trains around the U.S since childhood. She currently lives in the small California Delta town of Isleton in a house between the Sacramento River levee and the Georgiana Slough. She moved there from San Francisco where she completed her book.

Since her book tour of the West Coast, Southwest and Midwest, she has taken up bass fishing and family genealogy. Ooms is working with agencies in San Francisco and Sacramento dedicated to ending homelessness and fighting the underlying poverty that is causing the widespread predicament.