For Dori Sanders, the farming life and the writing life go hand in hand. It's that richness of place that serves as a wellspring for her writings. A best selling author, Dori was featured in Gourmet magazine (August 2004) and Southern Lady magazine (July 2004).

Dori can be found most days, from Memorial Day to Labor Day, at her family's peach stand in Filbert, South Carolina, selling peaches and autographing her books.

COUNTRY COOKING:
America's favorite peach farmer shares her memories of the family farm, her father and mother's pride in their ten children, and best of all, the wonderful fresh foods prepared and eaten in the family kitchen. She brings to life a country childhood and offers one hundred fresh-picked recipes in a book as delightful to read as it is to cook from.

"Packed with the directions for making such savory-sounding dishes as Smothered Chicken, Fresh Corn and Tomato Stew, Heavenly Flour-Bread Biscuits, and Sweet Potato Pound Cake with Peach Glaze, Dori Sander's Country Cooking, is peppered with anecdotes and the wisdom gleaned from Sanders' sixty-plus years as a member of a farming family."
-- Orlando Sentinel

CLOVER:
Clover is ten years old when her father, Gaten Hill , the principal of an elementary school, marries a white woman, Sara Kate. Hours later there is an automobile accident, and her father is dead. In this stunning novel, Dori Sanders tells a story of black-white relationships like no other ever written, as seen through the eyes of one of the most appealing and memorable characters in literature.

"Like the peaches that are so prominent in the story, Clover is bursting with sweetness, flavor, and color." -- San Francisco Chronicle

"Warmly engrossing...Sanders writes with wit and authority in this unusual gem of a love story." -- Chicago Tribune
-- Orlando Sentinel

Dori Sanders is from Filbert, SC, a tiny community in York County, near Rock Hill, SC and Charlotte, NC. Her family operates one of the oldest African-American farms in the region (her father, a former sharecropper, bought the land around 1915.). The farm produces fruits and vegetables and specializes in growing Georgia Bells and Elberta peaches which are sold at an old fashioned roadside stand.

Clover and Ms. Sanders' second novel, Her Own Place, offer the experience of growing up in the rural South. Dori Sanders' Country Cooking offers the taste of growing up in the rural South detailing the family recipes and stories told at the peach stand. The eighth of 10 children, Ms. Sanders grew up on her family's peach farm in Filbert. Working on the farm has had a lasting impact on the writer. Writing is her way of passing down family history to the next generation. "I guess I started writing because I wanted to leave something for my nieces and nephews, as a way to tell them what life was like on the farm, because I know when my generation passes, this farm will pass out of our family," Ms. Sanders said.

She received the Lillian Smith Award for Clover. It has been translated into numerous languages. Her Own Place is about a woman who buys a farm, works it, raises a family and moves to town. Protagonist, "Mae Lee represents all women who struggled after World War II, " Sanders said.

Ms. Sanders recalls telling stories at a place known as the "storytelling rock". Dori and her sisters and brothers would gather there for hours sharing all sorts of stories. Those sessions at the rock led to the formal creation of her own published stories.

The granddaughter of a freed slave, Ms. Sanders recently made an address at the 7th Annual Southern Foodways Symposium in Oxford, MS on the 40th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Her speech: Promise Land: A Farmer Remembers" tied family history, farming and the food we all share together. As Ms. Sanders said in her speech in October 2004 at the Symposium, "Food is universal. A must for survival. Food in its own way unites, it nourishes the body and soul."