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Sally Koslow
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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