Born in San Francisco, Sarah Stone has waited tables in an all-night diner; worked in the office of a haunted nudist camp and bodywork school in the Santa Cruz mountains; written for and taught/performed on "Live Action English" for Korean public television in Seoul; and, in Bujumbura, Burundi, taught ESL and writing, organized community events as a State Department "dependent spouse," reported on human rights, and looked after orphan chimpanzees at the Jane Goodall Institute. As an undergraduate, she studied art and writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz. In 1998, she received her MFA from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she studied fiction, creative nonfiction, and pedagogy. She has taught at the University of Michigan, the University of California, Berkeley, and San Francisco State University, among other places. She is now core faculty in the MFA in Writing and Consciousness at the California Institute of Integral Studies and teaching in the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers.

Her novel The True Sources of the Nile (Doubleday 2002/Anchor 2003) was a BookSense 76 selection. It has been translated into German and Dutch and adopted for classroom and book club use -- including the Detroit Free Press Book Club -- and is included in Geoff Wisner's A Basket of Leaves: 99 Books that Capture the Spirit of Africa. Her awards include Avery Hopwood and Jule Hopwood awards for the novel and essay, a Colby fellowship, a Shane Stevens Fellowship in the Novel at Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship at Sewanee Writers' Conference. She has published short fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and reviews and, with Ron Nyren, co-wrote Deepening Fiction: A Practical Guide for Intermediate and Advanced Writers (Longman 2005), published in a trade version as The Longman Guide to Intermediate and Advanced Fiction Writing (Sourcebooks, March 2007). Her recent publications include pieces in the McSweeney's volume The Future Dictionary of America, The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers, Ploughshares, and The Writer's Chronicle.