Short Bio (for introductions and such)

Sally Kilpatrick is the USA Today bestselling author of seven novels. She has won multiple awards, including the Georgia Author of the Year, the Maggie Award of Excellence, the Booksellers’ Best, and the Nancy Knight Mentorship Award. She lives in Marietta, Georgia with her husband, two kids, and two cats. You can find her at sallykilpatrick.com or on Twitter as @superwritermom.

Longer Bio (for your personal edification)

Sally Kilpatrick is the USA Today bestselling author of seven novels. She has won multiple awards, including the 2018 and 2019 Georgia Author of the Year, the Maggie Award of Excellence, the Booksellers’ Best, and the 2016 Nancy Knight Mentorship Award.

She began her writing career in Mrs. Shutt’s fourth grade class when students were asked to write stories that included all of their spelling words. She is happy to report that she managed to work in every spelling word every time. Her love of writing really took off in seventh grade when Mrs. B had students write in a round robin style. Other students whined, but she’d fallen in love.

From there she wrote short stories and longer novels—often while hiding from chores in her closet—all the way through college where she studied literature and writing, graduating Summa Cum Laude from the University of Tennessee with an English major as well as minors in Spanish and Women’s Studies.

From there she took a little detour into teaching Spanish—because that’s what you do with an English major—and having babies until being able to retire from teaching in 2008. She didn’t retire from motherhood, but she did renew her pursuit of writing, finally publishing her debut novel, The Happy Hour Choir, in 2015.

 Since then, she has written five more novels and one novella set in her fictional town of Ellery which is very loosely based on her hometown of Henderson, Tennessee. Her latest, Much Ado About Barbecue, is a very loose retelling of Much Ado About Nothing but with barbecue.

In addition to the awards mentioned previously, some of her proudest achievements as a writer include being described as “delightfully offbeat” by her own publisher and having a reviewer from The Romance Dish describe Bless Her Heart as “a little bit Flannery O’Connor, a little bit Fannie Flagg, but most delightfully and originally Sally Kilpatrick.” For an English major, it doesn’t get much better than that.

Sally grew up in the boonies outside the previously mentioned Henderson, Tennessee where her hobbies included giving free labor to the local librarian, playing trumpet—including “Taps” for the local funeral home, and a little light cattle rustling. She no longer plays the trumpet, but she does read, travel, taste wines, and then runs in an attempt to run off the calories from tasting the wines. 

 In addition to her B.A. from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, she also holds a Master of Professional Writing from Kennesaw State. She frequently gives workshops and speaks at book clubs, luncheons, and other venues. 

She has two children and refers to them as The Hobbit and Their Majesty on social media. She and her husband live in Marietta, Georgia near the Big Chicken, a KFC that you have to see to believe.