SANFORD, ANNETTE (1929–2012). Annette Sanford, a Texas author and teacher, was born Annette Schorre on August 3, 1929, in Cuero, Texas, to Louis and Anna (Barthlome) Schorre. Her father was a banker, and her mother was a teacher and homemaker. Sanford’s brother Charles Schorre was a well-known Houston painter and educator at Rice University and the Glassell School of Art in Houston. Her other brother Barth was a geophysicist and bird photographer, who published The Wood Warblers in 1998. All three Sanford siblings attended Cuero High School and the University of Texas at Austin. After college, Sanford taught English at Ganado High School in Ganado, Texas, for twenty-five years. On March 17, 1953, she married Lucius Sanford, a rural mail carrier. They were married for forty-one years until his death in 1994.
Sanford wrote short stories during her summers off as a teacher, until she finally began pursuing a full-time writing career. For ten years she wrote romance novels to support herself while writing short stories. She published twenty-five romance titles under the pseudonyms Mary Carroll, Meg Dominique, Anne Shore, Lisa St. John, and Anne Starr. From 1968 to 2004 Sanford published forty short stories, two short story collections (Lasting Attachments [1989], Crossing Shattuck Bridge [1999]), one novel (Eleanor and Abel [2003]), twenty-five paperback romances, and numerous book reviews for the Houston Post and the Dallas Morning News. She was featured in New Stories from the South six times. Her short story “Trip in a Summer Dress,” published in Prairie Schooner in 1978, was later made into a short film starring Janine Turner in 2004. Sanford’s writing, rooted in everyday small town life, is dialogue-driven and often humorous.
Sanford was a member of the Texas Institute of Letters. She received National Endowment for the Arts fellowships in 1974 and 1987 and was honored with the 1981 Texas Commission on the Arts Writer Recognition Award. She died on January 2, 2012, in Ganado, Texas. In 2012 DeGolyer Library at Southern Methodist University acquired Annette Sanford’s personal library and papers.
Sylvia Ann Grider and Lou Halsell Rodenberger, eds. Texas Women Writers: a Tradition of Their Own (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1997). Annette Sanford Papers, DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University, Dallas. Victoria Advocate, January 6, 2012.
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William E. Bard, "ADAMS, WALTER R.," Handbook of Texas Online (http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fad08), accessed March 19, 2015. Uploaded on June 9, 2010. Published by the Texas State Historical Association.