Please contact Sandra Worsham at seworsham@charter.net and visit her website at www.sworsham.com.
Sandra Worsham’s stories have been published in Memphis Magazine, Carolina Quarterly, Western Humanities Review, Ascent, and Chattahoochee Review, among others. She won First in Fiction in the Red Hen Press competition, and her story “Pinnacle” was published in the 2008 Los Angeles Review. Two of her stories were Finalists at Glimmer Train. After she retired from teaching writing to high school students for thirty years, her book on teaching writing, Essential Ingredients: Recipes for Teaching Writing, was published by ASCD in 2001. She was Georgia’s 1982 Teacher of the Year and a 1992 Milken Award Winner. In 2000, she was inducted into the National Teachers Hall of Fame. In June, 2006, she received her MFA in Fiction from Bennington College. Her new memoir, Going to Wings, was released this summer from Third Lung Press. This memoir is a book about reconciling the conflicts between spirituality / religion, sexuality, mother and daughter, and self. She lives in Milledgeville, Georgia, with her spouse and their two dogs.
PRAISE FOR GOING TO WINGS
"Filled with heart wrenching truths, Going to Wings will take you on a tender journey, lifting you to a place you may have never been before. For everyone who is looking for their authentic self, this book will give you the wings to soar upward." Reviewed by Kimberly Luyckx for Reader Views.
“… A palpable and invigorating book, mapping one woman’s lifelong efforts to discover her own sexual identity through Christianity and friendship.” Kirkus Review
“Sandra Worsham’s humor and clear-eyed honesty stitch this amazing quilt of meaning and experience together in a wonderful way.” Jill McCorkle, author of Life after Life and Going Away Shoes
"The struggle of the gay Christian's complicated effort to reconcile sexuality and faith is often overlooked by church leaders and more secular gays. But it is a complex, and deeply engaging journey. I was deeply moved by Sandra's book, engaged by her voice, her mind, her heart. I think many will find their very human story here in the hands of a wise and compelling woman."
--George Hodgman, author of Bettyville
“Sandra Worsham is the Mary Karr of Milledgeville, Georgia. This time the ‘Liars’ Club’ has extended its boundaries. The personal stakes break the reader’s heart as the lies, judgments, and deprivations whirl between Sandra, her family, her friends, her community, and her church. Yet this page-turning memoir of her quest for wholeness isn’t mired in despair. Despite the decades that she held her “vile” secret of homosexuality, she kept loving those who thwarted her coming of age. This page-turner oozes with Worsham’s grace and grit.”
--Amy Lou Jenkins, author Every Natural Fact: Five Seasons of Open-Air Parenting
“A terrific book of straight talk about a woman discovering her lesbian identity and holding to her faithfulness in God, as she lives in a world that makes those identities difficult to combine. Worsham writes in a way that captures the reader from the beginning page. She inspires us with her unflinching look at the hard task of living the truth, and the courage she shows in the face of loss.” --Elizabeth Cox, author of A Question of Mercy and Night Talk
"Such an honest and moving account, filled with loving detail, of one brave, passionate, and determined woman who struggles to fine true religion and true love.” —Sheila Kohler, author of Once We Were Sisters and Becoming Jane Eyre
“Sandra Worsham has written a candid and memorable narrative of her life in Flannery O’Connor’s home town of Milledgeville, Georgia: coming out as a lesbian, converting to Catholicism, and finding a life partner. Her struggles with family, church, and self constitute a compelling story that will resonate with many readers, especially those confronting issues of sexual identity and faith.” Sarah Gordon, author of Flannery O’Connor: The Obedient Imagination, A Literary Guide to Flannery O'Connor's Georgia, and Distances
"In Going to Wings, Sandra Worsham combines a southern raconteur's charm and candor with a social anthropologist's objective awareness to tell the story of a woman's second coming-of-age as a lesbian in a deeply conservative southern town. The result is a memoir both engaging and socially significant."
--Peter Selgin, author of Drowning Lessons, winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, and The Inventors, a memoir.
"Sandra Worsham loves women and she loves Catholicism. The result of loving both is a dramatic struggle well worth following.
Worsham tells her story--one of stunning losses and successes--with admirable style and wit, with charming innocence, and with honesty. I gobbled up this book with delight.” --Bruce Gentry, Professor of English, Georgia College & State University, Editor of the Flannery O’Connor Review, and author of Flannery O’Connor’s Religion of the Grotesque.
“’Years later I realized I had committed a murder for I had buried a part of myself.’ So says Sandra Worsham in a tender and entertaining memoir about love, family, sexuality, and faith in God. This is a story about growing into life and accepting death, about standing up for yourself while not putting others down, about finding yourself by giving yourself away. I laughed and I cried. I couldn’t put this book down.” --Sister Jeannine Gramick, SL, Co-founder of New Ways Ministry, a Catholic organization working for justice and reconciliation of LGBT Catholics with the wider Church, Author of Building Bridges: Gay and Lesbian Reality and the Catholic Church, 2006 Laureate of the International Mother Teresa Awards for her role as a human rights activist
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