March 27, 2026
It gives us great pleasure to present Season 11, Episode 11: Lauren Sanders!
Lauren Sanders shares the 25th Anniversary of their novel Kamikaze Lust. We discuss sex and sexuality in literature, how audience views on sex scenes have changed, and how to tell stories about porn without pornography.
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Bio:
Lauren Sanders (she/they) is the author of the novel & audiobook, Kamikaze Lust, which won a 2000 Lambda Literary Award and has been reissued in a 25th anniversary edition from Akashic Books, with a new foreword by Carly Moore. Lauren’s other novels include, With or Without You (a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award) and The Book of Love and Hate, which The Advocate called “a thrilling tale of espionage, family ties, sex, love, and betrayal.”
She is co-editor of a really fun cultural-pastiche anthology called Too Darn Hot: Writing About Sex Since Kinsey, and her short fiction, reviews, and journalism have appeared in various publications over the past decades, including Bookforum, the American Book Review, Poets & Writers, the long lost New York Press—anyone else remember when New York City was crawling with alternative weeklies?
By day Sanders runs editorial and digital content at a national foundation dedicated to education and the arts. She has served on nonprofit boards, most recently at New York Writers Coalition, whose mission was to cultivate community through free and low-cost writing workshops throughout New York City and beyond. She is a graduate of Barnard and Columbia’s J-school and along the way also snagged an MA in Creative Writing from City College.
Sanders was born in Queens and has lived most of her life between Brooklyn and downtown NYC, with a stopover during her formative years in Long Island (see, With or Without You, but remember it’s fiction, ok?). These days she resides in the nation of Brooklyn and cavorts on the north shore of Long Island where on clear day you might find her paddle boarding the Sound or hanging with her partner and Staffie mix, Maverick.
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