Sally Thomas

A biographical note

Sally Thomas is the author of two poetry collections. Motherland, a finalist for the 2018 Able Muse Book Award, was published by Able Muse Press in 2020. Among the Living, also from Able Muse Press, is forthcoming in 2024. Her novel, Works of Mercy, published by Wiseblood Books, appeared in 2022, selling over a thousand copies in 2023. Also published in 2022, the Paraclete Press anthology Christian Poetry in America Since 1940, co-edited with Micah Mattix, received Christianity Today’s 2023 Book Award in Culture and the Arts. A short-story collection, The Blackbird, will appear from Wiseblood Books in August 2024. Thomas is also the author of two poetry chapbooks and serves on the editorial staff of Able Muse Review.

Thomas’s poetry, fiction, essays, and reviews have appeared over the last thirty years in such publications as The New Yorker, The New Republic, First Things, Plough Quarterly, Religion and Liberty, and Public Discourse, as well as in literary journals: Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Dappled Things, Pulsebeat, Relief: A Journal of Art and Faith, Southern Poetry Review, The Sonora Review, and The Windhover, among others. In recent years she has been a multiple Pushcart Prize nominee in poetry and the recipient of two Editors’ Choice Awards in Fiction from Relief: A Journal of Art and Faith, as well as the 2020 J.F. Powers Prize for Short Fiction from Dappled Things. Her work has appeared in a number of anthologies, including the Best American Spiritual Writing series, edited by Philip Zaleski, and Rowan Williams’s A Century of Poetry: 100 Poems for Searching the Heart. The mother of four grown children, she lives quietly with her husband and dog in North Carolina.