Sandra Benitez
Born	Sandra Jeanette Ables (1941-03-26)March 26, 1941 Washington, D.C., U.S.
Died	July 25, 2024(2024-07-25) (aged 83) Minneapolis, MN, U.S.
Occupation	Novelist
Language	English
Education	Northeast Missouri State University (BS,MA)
Notable awards	Hispanic Heritage Award 2004 USA Gund Fellow 2006 American Book Award 1998Bitter Grounds

Sandra Benitez (March 26, 1941 - July 25, 2024) was an Americannovelist.

Sandra Jeanette Ables, better known by her pen nameSandra Benitez (Benitez being her Puerto Rican mother's maiden name) spent the first fourteen years of her childhood inEl Salvador while her father was based there as a diplomat. At the urging of her father, she attended high school in rural, northernMissouri with her paternal grandparents and subsequently graduated with a B.S. (1962) fromNortheast Missouri State University. Later she returned to her alma mater to earn an M.A. (1974)^[1]

In 1975 she moved with her then husband and two sons to the suburbs ofMinneapolis, Minnesota where she would remain for the rest of her life. After teaching and working as a translator she began seriously writing and in 1993, her first novel,A Place Where The Sea Remembers, was published byCoffee House Press.^[2]

Benítez has received a Loft-McKnight Award of Distinction for fiction, a Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grant as well as a 1992 Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowship. She was the Hispanic Mentor forThe Loft Inroads Program from 1989 to 1992. In 1997 she was selected as theUniversity of Minnesota Edelstein-Keller Distinguished Writer in Residence. In 1998 she did the Writers Community Residency for the YMCA National Writer’s Voice program. In the spring of 2001 she held the Knapp Chair in Humanities as Associate Professor of Creative Writing at theUniversity of San Diego.^[3][4]

• 1998American Book Award, forBitter Grounds
• 2004Hispanic Heritage Award for Literature.^[5]
• 2006United States Artists Gund Fellow^[6]

• A Place Where the Sea Remembers. Simon & Schuster. 1993.ISBN 978-0-671-89267-8.
• Bitter Grounds. Macmillan. 1998.ISBN 978-0-312-19541-0.
• The Weight of All Things. Hyperion. 2002.ISBN 978-0-7868-8703-3.Sandra Benitez.
• Night of the Radishes. Hyperion. January 2004.ISBN 978-0-7868-6400-3.
• Bag Lady: A Memoir, The Triumphant True Story of Loss, Illness and Recovery. Benitez Books. 2005.ISBN 978-0-9774848-0-5.

• Mickey Pearlman, ed. (15 October 1997)."Home Views".A Place Called Home: Twenty Writing Women Remember. St. Martin’s Press.ISBN 978-0-312-17443-9.
• Marilyn Kallet, Judith Ortiz Cofer, ed. (1999)."Fire, Wax, Smoke".Sleeping with One Eye Open. University of Georgia Press.ISBN 978-0-8203-2153-0.

• "Author Interview: Sandra Benitez",Book Browse
• Farhat Iftekharrudin, ed. (2003)."Sandra Benitez and the Nomadic Text".Postmodern approaches to the short story. Greenwood Publishing Group.ISBN 978-0-313-32374-4.

• 20th-century American novelists
• 21st-century American novelists
• American expatriates in El Salvador
• Novelists from Washington, D.C.
• 1941 births
• Living people
• University of Minnesota faculty
• University of San Diego faculty
• 20th-century American women novelists
• 21st-century American women novelists
• American Book Award winners
• Novelists from Minnesota
• American women academics

• Articles with short description
• Short description is different from Wikidata