Sallie Bingham's first novel was published by Houghton Mifflin in 1961. It was followed by four collections of short stories; her latest, published by Sarabande Books in October 2011, is titled Mending: New and Selected Stories. She has also published six additional novels, three collections of poetry, numerous plays (produced off-Broadway and regionally), and a family memoir, Passion and Prejudice (Knopf, 1989).
Her short stories have 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.
Born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky, Bingham has been married three times: to publisher A. Whitney Ellsworth, attorney Michael Iovenko, and contractor Tim Peters. She has three sons—film producer Barry Ellsworth, William Iovenko, and writer Christopher Iovenko—and five grandchildren. She currently resides in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
The Blue Box: Three Lives in Letters (Sarabande Books, 2014)
Short stories
The Touching Hand (Houghton Mifflin, 1967)
The Way It Is Now (Viking Press, 1972)
Transgressions (Sarabande Books, 2002)
Red Car (Sarabande Books, 2008)
Mending: New and Selected Stories (Sarabande Books, 2011)
Novels
After Such Knowledge (Houghton Mifflin, 1960)
Small Victories (Zoland Books, 1992)
Upstate (Permanent Press, 1993)
Matron of Honor (Zoland Books, 1994)
Straight Man (Zoland Books, 1996)
Cory's Feast (Sunstone Press, 2005)
Nick of Time (Sunstone Press, 2007)
Poetry
The High Cost of Denying Rivers Their Floodplain (privately published, 1995)
The Hub of the Miracle (Sunstone Press, 2006)
If in Darkness (Tebot Bach, 2010)
Plays
Milk of Paradise, two children adrift in a confusing world of distracted adults and too much poetry (The Women's Project and Productions, NY, 1980)
Couvade, a one-man show in which the actor gives birth on stage (Actors Theatre, Louisville, KY, 1981)
Paducah, a comedy about a love triangle in a small Kentucky town, in which the two women become best friends (The Women's Project and Productions, NY, 1983)
In the Presence, based on The Wall Between by renowned civil rights worker Anne McCarty Braden (Goucher College, Baltimore, MD, 1984; Mill Mountain Theatre, Roanoke, VA, 1986)
Hopscotch, the history of four well-known Kentucky women, including the truths that are often left out (Horse Cave Theater, KY, 1986)
The Awakening, an adaptation of the novel by Kate Chopin (Horse Cave Theater, KY, 1988)
Treason, about how Ezra Pound betrayed the three women who loved him while on trial for betraying his country (Perry Street Theatre, NY, 2006)