About

More About Sarah McCoy

I am the daughter of a Puerto Rican elementary school teacher and an Oklahoman Army officer. Born in Fort Knox, Kentucky, I didn’t stay in the Bluegrass State long enough to wear a Derby hat or sip the whiskey. By two years old, Edelweiss was my lullaby in Schweinfurt, Germany, and so my wandering life began. My family moved every ten months to two years until I hit thirteen. Then, the Army let us take root in Virginia, and I stayed in the Old Dominion for the next fourteen years. So by all accounts, I consider myself a southerner. Nothing is dearer to me than the morning fog creeping over the Blue Ridge Mountains, the sweet smell of magnolia trees in spring, the song of crickets and bullfrogs at night. After years of moving, I now love being home most of all.

I’ve had a lifelong love affair with creative writing. But I’ve found that just about every career author has a similar tale. From the time I could write my ABC’s, I’ve been writing little ‘books’ for my family and friends. And so it was for me. I think I presented my mom with my first book when I was in pre-school. I used crayons to draw colorful tulips on a lawn as the cover. It opened like a book and told the story of a little house with a family tucked inside its heart. The book culminated with I love you. The End.

I’ve tried to progress from there. Throughout my elementary and high school education, I found ways and reasons to hide out in the library, tipsy on the reading possibilities, and writing, always writing diaries, essays, fiction stories, school news articles, poems, reviews, anything I could. All that eventually led me to Virginia Tech, majoring in journalism and public relations. I thought I’d either be an on-air reporter or a magazine writer. Either way, I was fascinated by people and places and their story intersection. But I had a mountain of student loans and needed a solid gig to pay them back. So on graduation, I took a job as a public relations coordinator at a chemical company in Richmond, Virginia. It put food on my table but didn’t exactly feed the soul. I spent my days doing technical writing and my nights writing fiction. I wrote a novel. It was gobbledygook. But it showed me what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.

I applied to an MFA program at Old Dominion University near where my husband (fiancé at the time) was in medical school. I was ecstatic to be accepted and quit my job to move to Norfolk, Virginia. There, I join the unpaid, indebted graduate student ranks. I couldn’t have been happier. In that program, I met some of the most instrumental people of my life and wrote my first novel, The Time It Snowed In Puerto Rico.

Despite my transient childhood, I always felt my “home-home” was the one stable location where I had a majority of family on my mother’s side. Growing up, we’d fly to Puerto Rico once or twice a year. My grandparents lived and owned (still do) a farm in Aibonito, the mountainous heart of the island. The farm had seen my grandfather’s beans and corn, my great-grandfather’s sugarcane, and my great-great grandfather’s tobacco. Land is as constant as it comes. And unlike my ever-changing military childhood, I could always count on the island, my people and their stories. So it was natural that my first novel be set in that rich, beautiful culture. My grandparents still live on the farm with a majority of my second-cousins, great-titis and tios, et cetera, spread from San Juan to Mayaguez.

I wrote my second novel, The Baker’s Daughter, while living for nearly ten years in El Paso while my husband, Doc B, was stationed at Fort Bliss. It, along with my childhood in Germany, served as inspiration.

Every day since then, I sit down at my desk. I open a document and I write the best I can. There’s not one hour that it isn’t hard, but there’s not one hour that I would want to do anything else. I hope if you’re reading this, my work has struck a chord in some meaningful way. Connecting with you, the reader, gives me purpose and brings me joy. So thank you for being here. You matter. Thank you for reading my words. It matters.

You can find information for all my novels on the Books tab at the top of this page.