Sandra Gail Lambert

Interviewed March 21, 2016

Sandra Gail Lambert, author, grew up in a military family that did not live in the South until her father retired to an Atlanta suburb while she was in high school. She graduated from the Medical College of Georgia as a physician’s assistant in 1978, and she soon found that she did not like the work.

Sandra Gail Lambert throughout her life has been involved in many kinds of activism, including antinuclear protests and peace activism in South Carolina and Florida; and antiracism work through the Atlanta Lesbian Feminist Alliance (ALFA). While working in Atlanta, Georgia, she began volunteering at Charis Books and More, the feminist bookstore. By approximately 1980, she became what would soon be defined as a “worker-owner” of Charis Books and More, which is still in operation in 2022. She worked full-time there until 1988 with two other worker-owners, including the bookstore’s founder Linda Bryant. She credits becoming a writer to this immersion in the vibrant world of lesbian-feminist publishing. Post-polio syndrome forced her to take Social Security Disability Insurance and stop working at the bookstore.

Sandra Gail Lambert moved to Gainesville, Florida, where she began to focus on her writing. She writes fiction and essays, and a recurring subject is the disabled body and its relationship to the natural world. Her first publications were in Sinister Wisdom, and Common Lives/Lesbian Lives. Her work also appears in The Body of Love, an anthology edited by Tee Corinne. Her debut novel, The River’s Memory, was published when she was sixty-two. At sixty-six, she wrote her memoir, A Certain Loneliness, which explores the intersection of disability, queerness, and desire. She is a 2018 NEA Creative Writing Fellow. Her work has been published by The New York Times, The Sun Magazine, Orion, and The Paris Review.

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