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Alum Named to Poets & Writers 5 Over 50 for a Debut Memoir
by Writing Workshops Staff
40 minutes ago
“Incredibly warm and funny and tender, this is a riveting story.”
Susan Conley, author of Landslide, on What Kind of Mother
Judy Sandler is one of five writers in the 2026 5 Over 50, the annual Poets & Writers Magazine feature on authors who published a first book after fifty. She is 64, and the book is What Kind of Mother: A Reckoning, out since September from West Virginia University Press. Congratulations, Judy!
The memoir follows a mother through her son’s addiction and bipolar disorder, out of denial and toward the hardest conclusion available to a parent: that she cannot save him and only he can. One chapter is a shopping list: rain boots, a tick key, work gloves, the things he left behind for a treatment community in the Vermont woods. She tells the story in fragments, with emails, journal entries, and phone transcripts set beside her own account, so his voice is on the page with hers.
It took a while to get here, and Judy says so in her essay for Poets & Writers. There was a big New York agent, six months on submission, a pile of rejections, and a breakup over whether to try smaller presses. Judy sent the proposal out herself, and it landed with Renée K. Nicholson, editor of the Connective Tissue series at WVU Press.
Other writers have been reading closely. Morgan Talty, author of Night of the Living Rez, writes that “this is Literature with a capital L.” Elissa Altman, author of Motherland, calls it “a story that will stay with me forever.”
Judy is a WritingWorkshops.com alum, and Susan Conley was her teacher here, in a six-week generative class called Thinking in Book.
Judy grew up in Baltimore, where she taught in independent schools for more than twenty-five years, and holds an MFA from Stonecoast. Her work has appeared in numerous journals, including The New York Times’ Tiny Love Stories, Yale University Journal of Medicine’s The Perch, and The Atticus Review. She lives now in Lincolnville, Maine, and is the nonfiction editor of The Awakenings Review. Find more of her work on her website.
Order What Kind of Mother
What Kind of Mother: A Reckoning by Judy Sandler is available now in paperback from West Virginia University Press.
