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Colette Sartor

Goodreads Author

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https://colettesartor.com

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Genre

Fiction

Member Since

July 2011

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Colette Sartor grew up a nice, New Jersey Italian girl looking to escape the trajectory expected from nice, New Jersey Italian girls: marriage, three-kid minimum, Sunday mass followed by a sit-down dinner for the entire extended family that she alone would cook, serve, and clean up. After fleeing to Los Angeles to be an entertainment lawyer, she found herself disappointed by the Southern California beaches (not nearly as pretty as the Jersey shore) and by lawyering (which sucked), so she quit her job after a few years (okay, eight) and started writing fiction.

Colette’s linked short story collection Once Removed (University of Georgia Press) won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the NYC Big Book Award for Short Story Collections Colette Sartor grew up a nice, New Jersey Italian girl looking to escape the trajectory expected from nice, New Jersey Italian girls: marriage, three-kid minimum, Sunday mass followed by a sit-down dinner for the entire extended family that she alone would cook, serve, and clean up. After fleeing to Los Angeles to be an entertainment lawyer, she found herself disappointed by the Southern California beaches (not nearly as pretty as the Jersey shore) and by lawyering (which sucked), so she quit her job after a few years (okay, eight) and started writing fiction.

Colette’s linked short story collection Once Removed (University of Georgia Press) won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the NYC Big Book Award for Short Story Collections, the IAN Best Book of the Year Award for Outstanding Short Story Collection, the National Indie Excellence Juror’s Choice Award, and the National Indie Excellence Award for Short Story Collection.

Her work has appeared in The Chicago Tribune,Kenyon Review Online, Slice Magazine, Carve Magazine, The Rumpus, Hello Giggles, Prairie Schooner, Colorado Review, Harvard Review, and elsewhere. Among other places, her work has been anthologized in Short Stories from Printers Row, The Press 53 Open Awards Anthology, and Law and Disorder: Stories of Conflict and Crime. Her other awards include a Writers@Work Fiction Prize, a Fugue Prose Award, a Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award, a Reynolds Price Short Fiction Award, a Press 53 Open Award, and a Truman Capote fellowship from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she completed her MFA. She also is an alumna of the Community of Writers, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Ragdale Foundation Residency, and Tin House Summer Workshops.

Colette has taught writing for almost 20 years and currently teaches at UCLA Extension Writers’ Program and Los Angeles Writers’ House as well as privately. As a freelance editor, she has edited numerous fiction and nonfiction projects, including a creative writing textbook, and she served as senior fiction editor for the prize-winning Pif Magazine.

She also cohosts the Literary Roadhouse Bookclub podcast. In addition, she is the Executive Director of The CineStory Foundation, a nonprofit mentoring organization for emerging TV writers and screenwriters. She still lives in Los Angeles with her husband, son, and very large German Shepherd Dog who has yet to outgrow his destructo-boy instincts, and she never wants to practice law again. ...more

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Colette Sartor’s books

Average rating: 4.71 · 65 ratings · 24 reviews · 1 distinct work • Similar authors

Once Removed: Stories (Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction)
by

Colette Sartor (Goodreads Author),

Lee Abbott (Editor)

4.71 avg rating — 65 ratings — 2 editions

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Colette is Currently Reading

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The Vanishing Place

by Zoe Rankin (Goodreads Author)

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Jul 25, 2026 01:50PM

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The Impossible Thing

by Belinda Bauer (Goodreads Author)

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Jul 25, 2026 01:48PM

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Aspects of the Novel

by E.M. Forster

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Jun 21, 2026 12:55PM

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Colette’s Quotes

“Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

tags: darlings, deleting, editing, kill, revising, writing

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