
SALLY THOMAS
Sally Thomas is a poet and fiction writer. Born in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1964, she holds a Bachelor of Science degree from Vanderbilt University and has pursued graduate coursework in English and creative writing at the University of Memphis and the University of Utah. She has taught in both the high-school and the university classroom, and in an online program for home-educated students.
She is the author of two poetry chapbooks. Her full-length poetry book, Motherland, was a finalist for the Able Muse Book Award. Her debut novel, Works of Mercy, was published to notable acclaim in 2022, and The Blackbird & Other Stories appeared in 2024. With Micah Mattix, she is co-editor of a poetry anthology, Christian Poetry in America Since 1940. She is former Associate Poetry Editor of The New York Sun.
Sally lives with her family in North Carolina.
Over the past three decades, her writing has appeared in Anglican Theological Review, Dappled Things, Ekstasis, First Things, the New Yorker, North American Anglican, the New Republic, Plough Quarterly, Presence, Public Discourse, Southern Poetry Review, Sonora Review, THINK, Windhover, and many other journals in the U.S. and U.K.
Her poetry and fiction have received awards from the Associated Writing Programs, the Academy of American Poets, the North Carolina Literary Review, and Relief: A Journal of Art and Faith.
Works of Mercy was a 2022 Commonweal Book-of-the-Year
Reviews of Works of Mercy
Praise for Works of Mercy
"In Works of Mercy, we have been given a book that believes on every page, but never once preaches. Large in spiritual vision, deep and assured in literary execution, Thomas’s slow-burning debut deserves to be set next to fiction by Cather and Berry. This is a rare and precious treasure from a rare and precious talent.”
—Paul Pastor, author Bower Lodge
Purchase Works of Mercy
Praise for The Blackbird and Other Stories
“These are quiet, introspective, poetic fictions that have the intimacy of secrets. Sally Thomas’s characters are familiar, faith-filled, likable, and unextreme, each exhibiting the minor heroism of doing the best they can.”
—Ron Hansen, author of the short story collection Nebraska, the novel Mariette in Ecstasy, and many more
“Like Eudora Welty, Sally Thomas uses a small scale to great effect in The Blackbird and Other Stories, capturing the strange movements of the human heart with astonishing subtlety. It is one of the finest collections of short fiction in years, and Thomas is quietly establishing herself as one of our finest writers.”
—Micah Mattix, Poetry Editor at First Things and Professor of English at Regent University
Synopsis
In these nine stories, the human condition presents itself in dramas of loss, betrayal and breakage, the shortcomings and strangeness of love in a fallen world. In scenes that shift from the Blue Ridge Mountains to the West Tennessee countryside, from the otherworldliness of the Great Salt Lake to the mercurial waters of the Alabama Gulf Coast, families fray and fragment and whistle in the dark. Mothers mourn their lost children. Children flounder in the backwash of their parents’ chaos and despair. Old lovers take stock of each other. While married couples offer each other thin comfort in grief, divorced couples circle each other warily, aware that despite their separation, their lives remain forever entangled. Psychologists take refuge in therapeutic language, even as that language fails to articulate the very truths the heart cries out to confront. Although houses figure as places of refuge and repositories of memory, they offer only fragile shelter. Stored-up memories lie in ambush. Characters bent by the weight of the past work out their tangled futures against the backdrop of a large, mysterious universe, shining with a presence which signals itself in storm, birdsong, mysterious footsteps, and the evocative smoke of distant wildfires, whose smell brings hidden things to light.
Purchase The Blackbird and Other Stories
Sally Thomas is a poet and fiction writer. Born in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1964, she holds a Bachelor of Science degree from Vanderbilt University and has pursued graduate coursework in English and creative writing at the University of Memphis and the University of Utah. She has taught in both the high-school and the university classroom, and in an online program for home-educated students.
She is the author of two poetry chapbooks. Her full-length poetry book, Motherland, was a finalist for the Able Muse Book Award. Her debut novel, Works of Mercy, was published to notable acclaim in 2022, and The Blackbird & Other Stories appeared in 2024. With Micah Mattix, she is co-editor of a poetry anthology, Christian Poetry in America Since 1940. She is former Associate Poetry Editor of The New York Sun.
Sally lives with her family in North Carolina.
Over the past three decades, her writing has appeared in Anglican Theological Review, Dappled Things, Ekstasis, First Things, the New Yorker, North American Anglican, the New Republic, Plough Quarterly, Presence, Public Discourse, Southern Poetry Review, Sonora Review, THINK, Windhover, and many other journals in the U.S. and U.K.
Her poetry and fiction have received awards from the Associated Writing Programs, the Academy of American Poets, the North Carolina Literary Review, and Relief: A Journal of Art and Faith.
Works of Mercy was a 2022 Commonweal Book-of-the-Year
Reviews of Works of Mercy
Praise for Works of Mercy
"In Works of Mercy, we have been given a book that believes on every page, but never once preaches. Large in spiritual vision, deep and assured in literary execution, Thomas’s slow-burning debut deserves to be set next to fiction by Cather and Berry. This is a rare and precious treasure from a rare and precious talent.”
—Paul Pastor, author Bower Lodge
Purchase Works of Mercy
Praise for The Blackbird and Other Stories
“These are quiet, introspective, poetic fictions that have the intimacy of secrets. Sally Thomas’s characters are familiar, faith-filled, likable, and unextreme, each exhibiting the minor heroism of doing the best they can.”
—Ron Hansen, author of the short story collection Nebraska, the novel Mariette in Ecstasy, and many more
“Like Eudora Welty, Sally Thomas uses a small scale to great effect in The Blackbird and Other Stories, capturing the strange movements of the human heart with astonishing subtlety. It is one of the finest collections of short fiction in years, and Thomas is quietly establishing herself as one of our finest writers.”
—Micah Mattix, Poetry Editor at First Things and Professor of English at Regent University
Synopsis
In these nine stories, the human condition presents itself in dramas of loss, betrayal and breakage, the shortcomings and strangeness of love in a fallen world. In scenes that shift from the Blue Ridge Mountains to the West Tennessee countryside, from the otherworldliness of the Great Salt Lake to the mercurial waters of the Alabama Gulf Coast, families fray and fragment and whistle in the dark. Mothers mourn their lost children. Children flounder in the backwash of their parents’ chaos and despair. Old lovers take stock of each other. While married couples offer each other thin comfort in grief, divorced couples circle each other warily, aware that despite their separation, their lives remain forever entangled. Psychologists take refuge in therapeutic language, even as that language fails to articulate the very truths the heart cries out to confront. Although houses figure as places of refuge and repositories of memory, they offer only fragile shelter. Stored-up memories lie in ambush. Characters bent by the weight of the past work out their tangled futures against the backdrop of a large, mysterious universe, shining with a presence which signals itself in storm, birdsong, mysterious footsteps, and the evocative smoke of distant wildfires, whose smell brings hidden things to light.
Purchase The Blackbird and Other Stories