Sandra Jeanette Ables, better known by her pen name Sandra Benitez (Benitez being her Puerto Rican mother's maiden name) spent the first fourteen years of her childhood in El Salvador while her father was based there as a diplomat.

At the urging of her father, she attended high school in rural, northern Missouri with her paternal grandparents and subsequently graduated with a B.S.

(1974)[1] In 1975 she moved with her then husband and two sons to the suburbs of Minneapolis, Minnesota where she would remain for the rest of her life.

After teaching and working as a translator she began seriously writing and in 1993, her first novel, A Place Where The Sea Remembers, was published by Coffee House Press.

In the spring of 2001 she held the Knapp Chair in Humanities as Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of San Diego.