Sandra Gail Lambert
WRITER
Sandra Gail Lambert
Sandra Gail Lambert writes fiction and memoir that explores the intersections of disability, queerness, desire, and aging.
She is the author of My Withered Legs and Other Essays as well as the Lammy-nominated memoir A Certain Loneliness. She’s written two novels: The Sacrifice Zone: An Environmental Thriller and The River’s Memory.
Her writing has been 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.
News & Events
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! Sunday, April 28th. I’ll be reading at 3:30pm.
“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 Pre-order available now.
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.
“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
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