Sara Davidson first captured America’s imagination with her N.Y. Times best seller, Loose Change, about three women growing up in the Sixties. In her many books, articles, TV shows and radio interviews, she’s earned a reputation as a social observer who does cutting edge pieces about the way we live.
She was born in Los Angeles and went to the University of California at Berkeley. While participating in the student revolution, she was also elected to Phi Beta Kappa, majoring in English and writing for the Daily Cal. After Berkeley she headed for New York to attend the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. Her first job was with the Boston Globe, where she became a national correspondent, covering everything from the election campaigns of Bobby Kennedy and Richard Nixon to the Woodstock Festival and the student strike at Columbia.
Returning to New York, she worked as a free-lance journalist for magazines ranging from Harpers, Esquire, The Atlantic and the New York Times Magazine to Rolling Stone. She was one of the group who developed the craft of literary journalism, combining the techniques of fiction with rigorous reporting to bring real events and people to life. Her work is collected in the textbook, The Literary Journalists, by Norman Sims.
In 1975, Davidson moved back to California where for 25 years she alternated between writing for television and writing books. The books tend to fall in the gray zone between memoir and fiction. Davidson uses the voice of the intimate journalist, drawing on material from her life and that of others and shaping it into a narrative that reads like fiction.
In television, she created two drama series, Jack and Mike and Heart Beat, which ran on A.B.C. Heart Beat was the first ensemble of women on television who had no male boss above them, and featured the first lesbian character. She was later co-executive producer of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, wrote hundreds of hours of drama episodes, movies and miniseries, and in 1994 was nominated for a Golden Globe. She’s been a guest on national television shows such as The Today Show, Larry King Live and Sixty Minutes, and she conducts interviews and does commentary on public radio.
In the year 2000, her life began to unravel. She was divorced, her children were leaving for college and she couldn’t find work in television. Following her intuition, knowing nobody, she drove to Boulder, Colorado for three months to be a visiting writer at the University of Colorado. She never drove back and replanted herself in Boulder, a transition she writes about in Leap! Her current passions are: singing with friends, playing ukulele, skiing and hiking in the Rockies.