Sandra Schor was born in Queens, New York in 1932. Raised in Richmond Hill, Queens, where her parents owned a dry-goods store, she attended John Adams High School. While an undergraduate at Queens College, CUNY, she received the English Department Prize and the John Gassner Creative Writing Award and was a member of Phi Beta Kappa. In 1952, she graduated magna cum laude from Queens, and two years later, received an MA in Linguistics from Columbia University. Between 1952 and 1970, she wrote stories and poems, moving from Tennessee to Florida to Illinois, before returning to the New York area in 1959. After teaching at Hofstra University and CW Post College of LIU, she returned to Queens College in 1970, where she taught courses in literature, composition and creative writing until her death in 1990.

At Queens she served as Associate Chair of the English Department and Director of Composition, and was the Founding Director of the Writing Skills Workshop. She also Co-Directed the Queens English Project, a grant awarded by the Department of Education Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE). As Co-Director, she supervised 2000 participants, creating a two-year writing and reading program that provided a bridge between high school and Queens College for students from seven public high schools. Named a “Master Teacher” by the CUNY Dean of Academic Affairs, she worked to retrain tenured CUNY faculty in a variety of departments to teach writing and taught a Graduate Colloquium in the Teaching of Writing. A specialist in the field of composition, she served as a consultant to many institutions, including the New York City Board of Education, Nassau Community College, Ball State University, the US Department of HHS Applied Statistics Training Institute, the FIPSE National Tutor Training Institute, and the Great Neck Public Schools.

I n recognition of her achievements in the field of composition, she received the Mina P. Shaughnessy Writing Award, in addition to Faculty development Grants from CUNY and FIPSE. She published numerous articles and essays about composition as well as two highly acclaimed writing textbooks: The Borzoi Handbook for Writers (1985, 2nd ed. 1989), co-authored with Frederick Crews; and the Random House Guide to Writing (1978, 2nd ed. 1981, 3rd ed. 1986), co-authored with Judith Summerfield.

Sandra Schor was also a prize-winning novelist and poet. For her novel, The Great Letter E (North Point Press, 1990), she posthumously received the Harold U. Ribalow Award from Hadassah. In 1990, she received an Ingram Merrill Foundation Grant for her novel-in-progress, tentatively entitled The Prince, which was left unfinished when she died. Her short stories appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, Redbook, The Carlton Miscellany, the South Carolina Review, Sewanee Review, among other venues. She published nearly two dozen poems and translations (from Chinese) in such journals as Shenandoah, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner and many others.

She was married to Joseph M. Schor for thirty-seven years and had three children: Esther (Starry) [married to Walter Greenblatt], Joshua [married to Lori Schuldiner Schor] and Gideon. At the time of her death, she had three grandchildren: Daniel Greenblatt, Jordan Greenblatt and Noemi Schor. She was a devoted wife, sister, daughter, mother, mother-in-law, cousin, grandmother and friend. After living with cancer for more than fifteen years, she died on July 9, 1990 at the age of 58.