Sally Ember Books in Order

If you want the true starting point: This Changes Everything
If you like first-contact stories with big social stakes: This Changes Everything → This Changes My Family and My Life Forever
If you want more family and political fallout: This Changes Everything → This Changes My Family and My Life Forever
If you want the fullest multiverse and Psi Wars arc: This Changes Everything → This Changes My Family and My Life Forever → This Is/Is Not the Way I Want Things to Change

Sally Ember grew up in the St. Louis, Missouri, area and has said she started reading and writing at nine. Born in 1954, she has also written about a life shaped by frequent moves, family history, and a long fascination with change. That last idea is not just a theme in her fiction. It seems to sit near the center of how she sees the world.

Before her novels appeared, education took up a big part of her working life. Ember earned a BA in Elementary Education, then an M.Ed. and an Ed.D. She has worked as an educator, curriculum writer, tutor, editor, consultant, and nonprofit manager in several parts of the country. That background gives her fiction a practical streak. She is interested in how people learn, how institutions respond under pressure, and what good communication can and cannot fix.

Meditation matters here.

Ember has written that she began meditating in 1972 and later became a Tibetan Vajrayana Buddhist. She also says the stories in The Spanners grew out of dreams, meditation, visions, and a lot of scientific research. You can feel all of that in the books. They reach for big speculative questions, but they also pause for inner life, ethics, belief, and the slow work of staying steady when everything around you starts to shift.

She has also written openly about being raised Jewish, and that mix of religious background, spiritual practice, and social thought shows up across her work. Her novels often bring science, psychology, politics, family life, and questions of meaning into the same conversation. She is not especially interested in keeping those topics in separate boxes.

Her fiction career in novel form began with This Changes Everything in 2013. That book introduces Dr. Clara Ackerman Branon, the Many Worlds Collective, and the shock of making first contact public. The sequel, This Changes My Family and My Life Forever, widens the frame into resistance movements, psi training, and the strain that world-level change puts on family and community. This Is/Is Not the Way I Want Things to Change digs even further into multiple timelines, conflict, and hard choices. Readers who click with these books usually seem to like the mix of first-contact science fiction, romance, paranormal psi elements, and hopeful but messy social change.

Change is really her home territory.

The novels are only part of the picture. Ember has also published short stories, poetry, blog posts, articles, and critiques. Long before The Spanners, she was a produced playwright, with Crystal Dreams in 1983, and later co-wrote the nonfiction guide Acting Out: The Workbook in 1996. From 2014 to 2016, she also hosted CHANGES conversations between authors, an online talk show that ran for more than fifty episodes.

She has lived in many places, including the Midwest, New England, New Mexico, California, and the Philippines, and she has written more than once about moving often. After spending years back in St. Louis, she said she relocated to Seattle in February 2024. These days she appears to be writing, blogging, reading widely, and bringing an educator's patience and a meditator's comfort with impermanence to the page.