Debbie Harpham
from author’s website
Colette Sartor grew up a nice, New Jersey Italian girl looking to escape the trajectory expected from nice, New Jersey Italian girls: marriage, three-kid minimum, Sunday mass followed by a sit-down dinner for the entire extended family that she alone would cook, serve, and clean up. After fleeing to Los Angeles to be an entertainment lawyer, she found herself disappointed by the Southern California beaches (not nearly as pretty as the Jersey shore) and by lawyering (which sucked), so she quit her job after a few years (okay, eight) and started writing fiction.
Colette’s linked short story collection Once Removed (University of Georgia Press) won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. Her stories and essays have appeared in The Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, New York Magazine’s The Cut, Kenyon Review Online, Slice Magazine, Carve Magazine, Hello Giggles, Babble, The Good Men Project, Scary Mommy, Midlife Boulevard, Yahoo Parenting, FiveChapters, Printers Row Journal, The Drum, Paragraph Shorts, Fugue, Redux, Quarterly West, Role Reboot, draft: the blog of process [marginalia], Crab Orchard Review, Prairie Schooner, Colorado Review, Harvard Review, and elsewhere. Among other places, her work has been anthologized in Short Stories from Printers Row, The Press 53 Open Awards Anthology, and Law and Disorder: Stories of Conflict and Crime. In addition to the Flannery O’Connor Award, she has won a Writers@Work Fiction Prize, a Fugue Prose Award, a Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award, a Reynolds Price Short Fiction Award, a Press 53 Open Award, an honorable mention in Best American Short Stories, and a Truman Capote fellowship from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she completed her MFA. She also is an alumna of the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley Summer Writers Workshops, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Ragdale Foundation Residency, and Tin House Summer Workshops.
Colette has taught writing for almost 20 years and currently teaches at UCLA Extension Writers’ Program and Los Angeles Writers’ House as well as privately. As a freelance editor, she has edited numerous fiction and nonfiction projects, including a creative writing textbook, and she served as senior fiction editor for the prize-winning Pif Magazine.
She also cohosts the Literary Roadhouse Bookclub podcast. In addition, she is an Executive Director and the Co-Feature Director of The CineStory Foundation, a nonprofit mentoring organization for emerging TV writers and screenwriters. She still lives in Los Angeles with her husband, son, and very large German Shepherd Dog who’s afraid of the wind, and she never wants to practice law again.
You can view interviews with Colette here.
ABOUT ONCE REMOVED:
The women in the linked short story collection Once Removed carry the burdens imposed in the name of intimacy―the secrets kept, the lies told, the disputes initiated―as well as the joy that can still manage to triumph. A singer with a damaged voice and an assumed identity befriends a silent, troubled child; an infertile law professor covets a tenant’s daughterly affection; a new mother tries to shield her infant from her estranged mother’s surprise Easter visit; an aging shopkeeper hides her husband’s decline and a decades-old lie to keep her best friends from moving away.
With depth and an acute sense of the fragility of intimate connection, Colette Sartor creates stories of women that resonate with emotional complexity. Some of these women possess the fierce natures and long, vengeful memories of expert grudge holders. Others avoid conflict at every turn, or so they tell themselves. For all of them, grief lies at the core of love.
AUTHOR VISITS:
Author visits with Colette Sartor are available via NovelNetwork.com.