Sally Toner, a Pushcart-nominated writer, has lived and taught high school English in the Washington, D.C. area for over twenty-five years, but she hails from every corner of the state of Virginia. Her family ties to Abingdon go back centuries, and, from Tidewater to the Shenandoah Valley, the ocean, the mountains, and the tease of Mid-Atlantic seasons have had a profound influence on her work. Recently, she rediscovered family roots in the state of Georgia as she, in middle age, decided to add to a legacy of Bulldogs by completing her MFA in Narrative Nonfiction at the University of Georgia.
Prior to her graduate studies, she earned a BA in English and a minor in music from the College of William and Mary in 1992. She married a year later, eventually settling in the original planned community of Reston, twenty minutes from the nation’s capital. She lives there with her husband and a grumpy Russian Blue, visiting her two grown daughters in New Haven and San Diego whenever she can.
She published Anansi and Friends, a hybrid collection of poetry and essays centered around her experience with triple-negative breast cancer, in 2019. She was also the 2024 winner of the F. Scott Fitzgerald fiction contest sponsored by Montgomery College and a winner of the prize for literary non-fiction in the F. Scott Fitzgerald Photojournalism Competition sponsored by the University of Baltimore. Her work has appeared in Northern Virginia Magazine, JMWW, Gargoyle Magazine, The Delmarva Review, Watershed Review, Fractured Lit, and other publications. Her fiction is also included in two anthologies of the Grace and Gravity series—collections of work from Washington, D.C., area women writers edited by Richard Peabody and Melissa Scholes Young. Her fiction is also included in And if that Mockingbird Don’t Sing: Parenting Stories Gone Speculative published by Alternating Current Press. Her nonfiction also appears in America’s Future--an anthology published by Washington Writers’ Publishing House in 2025. You can find her on Facebook as Sally Huggins Toner, @salliemander.bsky.social on Bluesky, https://www.linkedin.com/in/sally-toner-65290346/ on LinkedIn, salliemander70 on Instagram, and on X at @SallyToner
Sally Huggins Toner 