Annette Sanford was born August 3, 1929, in Cuero, Texas, to Louis and Anna Schorre. Louis was a banker and Anna was a teacher and homemaker. Annette attended Cuero High School and the University of Texas at Austin. In 1953 she married Lucius “Lukey” Sanford, a rural mail carrier. She taught high school English in Ganado, Texas, for 25 years before devoting all her time to writing. Annette’s older brother Charles was a well-known Houston painter who taught at Rice University and the Glassell School, and was also the subject of a book about his life. Her other older brother, Barth, was a geophysicist and bird photographer, and published The Wood Warblers in 1998. From 1968-2004 Annette Sanford published 40 short stories, 2 short story collections, one novel, 25 paperback romances, close to 70 book reviews for The Houston Post and The Dallas Morning News, and was featured in New Stories From the South six times. Annette Sanford’s romance novel pseudonyms include Mary Carroll, Meg Dominique, Lisa St. John, Anne Shore, and Anne Starr. Her romance paperbacks have been translated into thirteen languages. The short story “Trip in a Summer Dress” was published in Prairie Schooner in 1978, and was later made into a TNT network television movie starring Janine Turner in 2004. Sanford’s fiction is dialogue-driven, rooted in everyday small town life, and often humorous. “When I left teaching to write short stories full time, I supplemented my income by writing paperback romances (25 of them under 5 pseudonyms) for a period of about ten years … When I was financially able, I stopped writing and have concentrated ever since on the short story, which endlessly intrigues me. I am much concerned with rhythm in my prose, with character and with letting the story reveal itself to me – an extremely slow process usually, so for having written steadily for more than thirty years, I have published only a small number of stories.” Annette was a member of Texas Institute of Letters, and was awarded National Endowment for the Arts fellowships in 1974 and 1987, as well as the 1981 Texas Commission on the Arts Writer Recognition Award. She passed away January 2, 2012 in Ganado, Texas.

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