About
Colette’s linked short story collection Once Removed (University of Georgia Press) won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the IAN Best Book of the Year Award for Outstanding Short Story Collection, the NYC Big Book Award for Short Story Collections, the National Indie Excellence Award for Short Stories, and , the National Indie Excellence Juror’s Choice Award. In addition, it was first runner up for the Eric Hoffer Short Story/Anthology Award and a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Grand Prize, the Eric Hoffer First Horizon Award, the IAN Best Book of the Year Award for Outstanding Women’s Fiction, and the Balcones Fiction Prize, and was shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize for Fiction.
Her work has appeared in The Chicago Tribune,Kenyon Review Online, Slice Magazine, Carve Magazine, The Rumpus, Hello Giggles, 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. Her other awards include 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, 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, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Ragdale Foundation Residency, the Wildacres Residency Program, and Tin House Summer Workshops.
Colette has taught writing for 20 years and currently teaches at UCLA Extension Writers’ Program 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.
Featured Work
ONCE REMOVED: STORIES
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.
