Sandra Gail Lambert

WRITER

Sandra Gail Lambert

Sandra Gail Lambert is a writer. Her essays, novels, and short stories explore the intersections of disability, queerness, lesbian desire, and aging.

She is the author of My Withered Legs and Other Essays, a 2025 Publishing Triangle and Lambda Literary Award finalist, as well as the memoir A Certain Loneliness, which was also a Lammy Finalist. She’s published two novels: The Sacrifice Zone: An Environmental Thriller and The River’s Memory.

Her writing is widely anthologized and has been accepted by a variety of journals including The New York Times, The Sun Magazine, Uncharted, Narratively, Orion, The Millions and The Paris Review. She is an NEA Creative Writing Fellow.

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News & Events

My Withered Legs and Other Essays — a finalist for the 37th Annual Lambda Literary Awards.

“Writing the Truth When Memory is Fractured, Flawed, or Absent.” Sunday Assembly Gainesville. 8/17/25

Disability Pride: Exploring the Overlap of Disability and Queerness – Pride Community Center, Sunday July 20, 2025 3pm Reading and Discussion

All Things LGBTQ Interview Show—Podcast with Sandra Gail Lambert 5/20/25

Uncharted Magazine, who published my short story “The Happiest Place on Earth” asked me to record a writing advice video for them.

“The Summer Extravaganza: A Pride Celebration Renamed” – A Substack essay of my remarks, more or less, after the reading at The Harn Museum.

Art After Dark at the Harn Museum –A reading of my work followed by a discussion about what counts as activism and the responsibilities (or not) of us queer writers in repressive times. June 12, 2025

“Malicious Compliance” – my latest Substack essay “And their school’s disability resource office had told them, a group of disabled students, not to use the words “diversity” or “inclusion” in their meetings.”

My Withered Legs and Other Essays nominated for the 2025 Publishing Triangle’s Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction

Audible version of My Withered Legs and Other Essays, narrated by Sara Morsey, released. March 2025

“Rogue Shark Scientist, Rogue Writer” – Substack Essay “And now I think I should call myself a “rogue writer.” But I don’t say it out loud. Yet.”

Sinister Wisdom—Review of My Withered Legs by Kali Herbst Minino and Gabe Tejada

Wordgathering Review of My Withered Legs by Ona Gritz

“How One Woman Fought For the Chance to Become a Better Writer” — Narratively Magazine The Art of Narrative Storytelling series.

“The Happiest Place on Earth” – Uncharted Magazine, 5/17/24

Fifth Avenue Arts Festival. Festival Authors Corner – Saturday 5/4. Noon-3pm.

The Lynx Bookstore Grand Opening!

“Old Lesbian Love” – The Millions Essays – 3/5/25

Disability Pride Month/Women’s History Month Presentation – Santa Fe College. Monday, March 18th at noon. NW campus, Library Y-102

My Withered Legs Launch Event – Matheson Museum, Gainesville, FL, March 3, 2024 2pm. Free with Registration. In person or Zoom.

My Withered Legs and Other Essays– University of Georgia Press, March 1, 2024

My Withered Legs

and Other Essays

A seventy-year history of disability is the framework for Sandra Gail Lambert’s collection of personal essays. Here are tales of lesbian love, aging, and the body’s changing relationship to itself and the world. Along with the uncertainties, triumphs, and often slapstick humor of becoming a writer later in life, these essays are grounded in queer, crip, and climate politics. Nominated for the 2025 Publishing Triangle’s Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction

“This is a must-have collection by Sandra Gail Lambert, one that draws together disability, community activism and political analysis, friendship and queer community, aging, love, and the minefields of family—all with deadpan humor and the occasional creek filled with alligators. More than merely timely, these essays offer the gift of stability, radical perspective, and a reminder of activist lineages and how we survive: together.”

—Sonya Huber, author of Pain Woman Takes Your Keys and Other Essays from a Nervous System

“Sandra Gail Lambert’s My Withered Legs and Other Essays is a wonderful collection of gripping, moving, occasionally lusty, always empowering observations that ring with truth. Lambert’s storytelling style is sharp, vivid, and propulsive. This is the sort of book you won’t soon forget.”

—Ben Mattlin, author of Disability Pride: Dispatches from a Post-ADA World

“Lambert has the rare ability to make you feel invited into her life despite the fact that she is so thoroughly pissed off. At the heart of these essays you’ll find camaraderie, humor, raw honesty, and cathartic anger toward an ableist infrastructure, and an ageist one. While this anger gives the collection a political heart, and an analytical dimension, it is Sandra’s life, loves, adventures, and reflections that give the collection its grace and style. The emotional range of the book is impressive—the narrator cares for her aging mother, falls in love with her wife, gets sick (in an almost Tig Notaro-esque cascade of calamities), becomes a successful writer, reflects on childhood disability, moves through the outdoors, and laughs uproariously with her friends. There were too many moments to count when I felt just utterly charmed by the narrator’s heart, by her sense of humor.”—Aisha Sabatini Sloan, author of the Lambda Literary Award-winning Borealis

“A writer of infinite talent, these essays focusing on disability, queerness, climate, and coming to writing later in life will evoke laughter, tears, self-recognition, and more than a few hallelujahs.” —Connie May Fowler

“Spend time with Lambert, whose wit and buoyant charm might just shift your perspective.” —Brinda S. Narayan

“Add to this that her writing is crisp, authentic, witty, and utterly captivating and we have a book that is essential reading both within and beyond the disability community.” —Ona Gritz, author of the award winning Everywhere I Look: A Memoir

Sandra Gail Lambert has an ear for the poetry of voices, the music of land, and the roar of history.

Tayari Jones

Lambert has written a brilliant and necessary account of a wise and triumphant life. I’m in awe of her gifts.

Carolyn Forché

Lambert’s sensuous writing is not unlike the water she returns to again and again: fluid yet direct, supple and strong.

Sara Rauch