Sallie Bingham
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Sallie Bingham | |
|---|---|
 Bingham at a reading for Red Car, 2010 | |
| Born | January 22, 1937 Louisville, Kentucky, U.S. |
| Died | August 6, 2025 (aged 88) Santa Fe, New Mexico, U.S. |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Alma mater | Radcliffe College |
| Genre | Short story, novel, poetry, drama, memoir |
| Relatives | Barry Bingham Sr. (father) |
Sarah Montague "Sallie" Bingham (January 22, 1937 – August 6, 2025) was an American author, playwright, poet, teacher, feminist activist and philanthropist. She was the eldest daughter of Barry Bingham Sr., patriarch of the Bingham family of Louisville, Kentucky.
Sallie Bingham's first novel, After Such Knowledge, was published by Houghton Mifflin in 1960. It was followed by six collections of short stories; her latest, to be published in September 2025 by Turtle Point Press, is titled How Daddy Lost His Ear: And Other Stories. She also published six additional novels, three collections of poetry, numerous plays (produced off-Broadway and regionally), and two family memoirs, Passion and Prejudice (Knopf, 1989) and Little Brother (Sarabande Books, 2022).
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,[1] Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, and The Harvard Advocate Centennial Anthology. She received fellowships from Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.
Bingham worked as a book editor for The Courier-Journal in Louisville and was a director of the National Book Critics Circle. She was the founder of the Kentucky Foundation for Women, which published The American Voice, and the Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History and Culture at Duke University.
In the 1980s, Bingham sat on the board of newspaper company run by her family, whose publications included The Courier-Journal and The Louisville Times.[2] Dissatisfied with how the company treated women and racial minorities who worked there, her internal pressures and other political activity brought her into direct conflict with her brother, Barry Bingham Jr., who by then led the board.[2] Barry Bingham eventually expelled all family members from the board, but Sallie Bingham responded by putting her shares up for public sale, which eventually led the Bingham family to divest entirely from the newspaper business in 1986, selling the company.[2]
Personal life and death
Born Sarah Montague Bingham in Louisville, Kentucky, on January 22, 1937, Bingham was married three times: to publisher A. Whitney Ellsworth, attorney Michael Iovenko, and contractor Tim Peters.[2] She had three sons—film producer Barry Ellsworth, William Iovenko, and writer Christopher Iovenko—and five grandchildren.[citation needed]
Bingham died from a stroke at her home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on August 6, 2025, at the age of 88.[2]
