Biography

Sallie Bingham (1937-2025) was a writer, teacher, feminist activist, and philanthropist.

Sallie’s first novel After Such Knowledge was published by Houghton Mifflin in 1961, and was followed by four collections of short stories. Her final book, also a collection of short stories entitled How Daddy Lost His Ear and Other Stories (September, 2025) featured the stories, “What I Learned From Fat Annie” which won the Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize in 2023 and “How Daddy Lost His Ear,” which received second prize in the 2023 Sean O’Faolain Short Story Competition and was published in the summer 2024 edition of Southword.

Her final novel, Taken by the Shawnee, is a fictional adventure story based on the life of Margaret Erskine, her many times great grandmother, and was published by Turtle Point Press in June, 2024.

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 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 worked as a book editor for The Courier-Journal in Louisville and was a director of the National Book Critics Circle. She was 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 lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico for over 20 years.

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 final novel, 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 final book, a collection of short stories entitled How Daddy Lost His Ear and Other Stories (September, 2025), received second prize in the 2023 Sean O’Faolain Short Story Competition.

She was 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. Sallie lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico and passed away on August 6, 2025.

 

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