Sandra Sutton was born and raised in a small town in North Carolina. She attended high school and college in the state, as well. One of several children, she came to Brooklyn with sisters in the mid-1980s while her brothers went into the armed services. While living with a sister in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Crown Heights, she married at age thirty and purchased a home nearby. Taking her husband's name, Gibbs, she taught at P.S. 41 in Brooklyn's Brownsville neighborhood. The couple didn't have children and divorced after ten years. After some library experience during her eighteen years of teaching, Sutton studied Library Science at Pratt Institute and received her master's degree. She was hired by Brooklyn Public Library and worked at the Eastern Parkway branch at the time of the interview in 2010. In 2015, she was a Neighborhood Library Supervisor at the Red Hook branch.