Sally Koslow

http://www.sallykoslow.com

Magnolia Gold, the heroine of Little Pink Slips, wanted to join the world of magazines. This was true of Sally Koslow, her alter ego, as well. Like Magnolia, Sally was born and raised in Fargo, North Dakota, where she edited her high school newspaper, worked as an intern on her hometown newspaper and dreamed of landing in publishing. After graduating from the University of Wisconsin in Madison with honors in English, she moved to Manhattan and started at Mademoiselle Magazine. Like Magnolia, when people asked Sally what connections she'd exercised to snag that job, she fessed up to ignorance as her sole advantage: if she'd grown up in the New York area, she'd have been too intimidated to have called Human Resources at Conde Nast Publications.

Sally rose in the ranks at Mademoiselle and Woman's Day and in 1994 became the editor-in- chief of McCall's, at the time the country's oldest women's magazines. Eight years later, McCall's was transformed into the short-lived Rosie, edited by the celebrity Rosie O'Donnell. Rosie moved into Sally's office and Sally, was named corporate editor until her job was eliminated. Later that year Sally went on to create a magazine prototype for Lifetime Television for Women, owned by Disney and Hearst Magazines, and became the first editor-in-chief of the magazine, which was called Lifetime.

Writing Little Pink Slips was a happy accident. When Sally's job at Lifetime ended, she decided to join a workshop to try and write fiction. Her first submission eventually became Chapter 1 of Little Pink Slips, which took her eighteen months to write. Now, thoroughly infected with the fiction writing bug, she is completing her second novel.

Sally teaches at the Writing Institute at Sarah Lawrence College and is on the faculty of the Algonkian Novel Workshop and the New York Writer's Workshop. She consults with and contributes essays and articles to many American women's magazines, including O the Oprah Magazine, O at Home, More, Ladies' Home Journal, Hallmark, Health and Good Housekeeping. On television, she has been featured on Today, Good Morning America, Entertainment Tonight, Fox & Friends, Good Day New York and news programs affiliated with MSNBC, CNN Headline News, and CNBC. She has lectured at Yale University, Columbia University, New York University, the University of Chicago, The University of Wisconsin and many other colleges, professional associations and community groups

Unlike Magnolia, Sally has been long-married to her college boyfriend, Robert Koslow. They are the parents of two sons, Jed and Rory. Like Magnolia, Sally lives on Manhattan's Upper West Side and can often be found running in Central Park, shopping at sample sales and meeting her magazine friends for lunch.

Photo by Maura McEvoy

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