About

Sally J. McMillan writes at the intersection of communication, technology, and American life. She is currently completing her debut novel and collaborating on an anthology documenting life in 2026.McMillan spent 22 years at the University of Tennessee, where she was a professor of communication, department head, associate dean, and vice provost.As a journalist, she has bylines in the St. Paul Pioneer Press, Milwaukee Journal, and Post Alley. Early in her career she contributed poetry and short fiction to an elementary reading series. She lives in Seattle.

Fiction

McMillan is near completion of her debut novel tentatively titled My Name is Allen White. The story follows the title character from his childhood in a strict Seventh-day Adventist home through his early career as a physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. The backdrop of mid-twentieth-century events provides sharp relief to Allen's private attempts to balance dedication and love, beauty and truth, faith and science.The novel echoes Chaim Potok’s My Name is Asher Lev in structure and in spirit – faith-based behaviors that persist even when their foundation crumbles, a son whose gifts carry him beyond the world his father built, and a love that survives rupture even when reconciliation fails.

Anthology

McMillan is collaborating with other Seattle-area writers to create an anthology of short-form writing that focuses on citizenship. The writers are doing what writers have always done: pay attention.The year 2026 provides the frame. This year marks the 250th anniversary of a republic whose founding ideals have never been fully realized and are now loudly contested. An election in November will ask voters to weigh in on what kind of country this is becoming. Since early 2025, a torrent of executive action has reshaped daily life with a speed that is designed to overwhelm and distract.Members of the group have done something similar before. Writing While Masked documented 2020 – the first year of the COVID epidemic. That book was not planned. It grew organically as the writers recognized the fundamental changes happening in their lives and in the world. Now the group is trying to recognize a hinge year as it unfolds – to write down what they witness before the fire hose of events washes those experiences away.

• Writing While Masked

Journalism

McMillan's most recent journalistic work has been for Post Alley, a Seattle-based writers’ collective aimed at helping fill gaps in local journalism and exploring new ways of delivering quality reporting and commentary. She writes primarily about higher education, media trends, and her Ballard neighborhood.

• Post Alley Publications

Academic Writing

McMillan's academic work explored how people and institutions adapt to new media. Her most recent scholarly book, Digital Immigrants and Media Integration (2023), examined how a generation shaped by analog communication technology came to rely on smartphones.

• Digital Immigrants and Media Integration

• Google Scholar Profile

Contact

Contact me through LinkedIn or by email: sjmcmill74 (at) gmail.com