Celebration of Life and Book Launch for "How Daddy Lost His Ear: And Other Stories" by Sallie Bingham

Come Celebrate Sallie Bingham's Life and the launch of her book "How Daddy Lost His Ear" Tuesday Sept 23rd, at 5pm at Garcia Street Books

Four generations of an extended mixed-race family live with the problems we've all heard about, yet thrive amidst hardship, turning the myth of the Old West on its head.

Prize-winning story writer Sallie Bingham's latest group of tales reverse commonly held assumptions about the American West. The Hispanic, Native, and white members of this rough and tumble family pivot around an outrageously funny and fallible rodeo rider known as Cowboy. They live with alcohol and drug addiction, dependency on a fraying welfare system, poverty, violence, and deep-held loyalties. Unlikely learning and unlikely sources of wisdom abound. "During those long winter nights when Dad took off for Sheridan—no liquor allowed on the rez but Sheridan is only about twenty miles west," Fat Annie tells the boy known as Sure Enough some truths about women that will guide him for the rest of his life. Running away on horseback from the imposition of ashes at his Jesuit boarding school, eleven-year-old Jimmy James finds "this little lady priest" in the town park. She makes the cross with ashes on his horse's head, then turns to him, and he feels the cross "burn into him worse than any brand." A bizarre accident in "How Daddy Lost His Ear" results in an equally bizarre wedding. And one of the many "white ladies" who appear briefly and disappear fast finally gets Cowboy to tell the truth.

These men, women, and kids don't just endure. They thrive in their own peculiar style, turning seemingly tragic outcomes into sources of madcap humor, and nourishing indelible family ties. This is the West as it was and is, a complex web of traditions and surprising, even shocking, ways of finding triumph.

Sallie Bingham's long and fruitful career as a writer began in 1960 with the publication of her first novel, After Such Knowledge. This was followed by 15 collections of short stories in addition to novels, memoirs and plays, as well as the 2020 biography The Silver Swan: In Search of Doris Duke. Her 2024 novel, Taken by the Shawnee, is a work of historical fiction. Her previous memoir, Little Brother, was published by Sarabande Books in 2022. Her short story, “What I Learned From Fat Annie” won the Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize in 2023 and the story “How Daddy Lost His Ear,” from her forthcoming short story collection How Daddy Lost His Ear and Other Stories, received second prize in the 2023 Sean O’Faolain Short Story Competition.

She was an active and involved feminist, working for women’s empowerment; She founded the Kentucky Foundation for Women, which gives grants to Kentucky artists and writers who are feminists, The Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture at Duke University, and the Women’s Project and Productions in New York City.