Writer, Poet, Abuelita, and cat trainer, Sandra has loved writing since she studied the beatnik poets in Marin County in the 1970’s. She’s published short stories and poetry as well as six historical fiction novels set in early America.
The Fidelia McCord Series that takes young Fidelia from 1847 to the midst of the Civil War is complete and available on Amazon. Her novel, The Dalhart Girls, is set in the 1950’s in Dalhart, Texas–a story of three very different women forming a friendship and changing with the times.
She has published poems in Aging Without Grace, and has been published in The Ocotillo Review, The Write Launch, the Sandy River Review, and others to include anthologies. She is grateful to have been invited to be the Poet Laura at Tweetspeak Poetry from late 2024 through October 2025.
A graduate of The University of Texas at Austin, she majored in English and French literature. Originally from Glasgow, Delaware, and growing up as a USAF “brat,” Sandra resides in central Texas but dreams of living in the Davis Mountains.
Member of Writers’ League of Texas
Member of Women Writing the West
Member of the Historical Novel Society
Wayward
As I sit in the heavy heat of a Texas summer, the hot breeze rustles the hollies and hackberries, a place so foreign to a coastal girl who covets the sway of marsh grass shielding terrapins and avocets along the Delaware estuary, where the waxed spike-grass blooms purple in a summer light caressed by sea breeze and burrowed taut in briny muck where tides ebb, where water tables rise to cattails I'd once sparked with a match and swirled through night. Where muskrat love, and the mottled leaves of skunk cabbage slyly fold to prayer. The sloped land of pickerelweed and the whimsical buttonbush with shades of Dr. Suess, the drooping sedge cheered by the yellow petals of hooked buttercup held midst wool=grass and rabbit foot girdled in spatterdock floating lush. Where the medicinal sundew flourish and feast on flies. Where, higher and unsalted, sits Cedar Swamp and Blackbird Creek, places dark and eerie, once beloved by the Nanticoke and Lenape for its palpatitating tidewaters on the Eastern Shore. Where bog turtles fed farmers and the early tribes. Oh, but for the song of a marsh wren calling me home where home is no more than a graveyard at town's end.
