With ancestral roots in the South, Sally Avery Bermanzohn grew up in New York. She headed to North Carolina for college in the 1960s, actively participating in the movements for civil rights, women's equality, and ending the Vietnam War. Graduating from Duke University, she became a community organizer and later a union organizer. She was present at the Greensboro Massacre in 1979 where Ku Klux Klan attacked the demonstrators and killed five people. Her husband survived a bullet wound to the head and arm, and is still partially paralyzed. Sally, her husband, and their two little daughters relocated to New York City. Sally went to graduate school and earned a doctorate in political science, writing a dissertation that evolved into the book, Through Survivors Eyes: From the Sixties to the Greensboro Massacre (Vanderbilt University Press, 2003). Sally taught at Brooklyn College for twenty years. Now retired, she lives in Hudson Valley with her husband, cats, and chickens, and writes historical fiction.