After the 2016 election, I started a regenerative farm in the Appalachian Mountains as an act of resistance against environmental collapse. But when my engagement unraveled under the weight of undiagnosed bipolar II, childhood trauma, and unresolved adoption grief, the solitude meant to fuel my activism became a crucible for everything I’d spent years outrunning.
A DNA test revealing biological siblings I didn’t know I had sent me deep into the mountain hollers chasing family secrets and long-lost kin. There I found Georgina Mae — my birth mother — whose struggles with addiction, survival, and domestic and sexual violence echoed my own. As I pieced together her past, I had to confront a hard truth: some reunions carry a cost, and some answers stay buried with those no longer here to give them.
Interwoven with myth and memory, Uprooted — shortlisted for the International Bridport Prize in memoir, Honorable Mention at the London Book Festival, and winner of the Reader’s Choice Gold Award — is a lyrical meditation on family, identity, and the strength it takes to grow something new from broken ground.
“Uprooted is a story of fierce honesty and mythic resonance, and, above all else, a story of transformation.”
Mark Powell, Author of The Late Rebellion
Read what Critics Are Saying
I’ve long marveled at S.B. Long’s unsurpassed gift for narrative, brilliantly displayed in her extraordinary new memoir, Uprooted, a tale as powerfully and imaginatively rendered as the very best fiction. Harrowing, heartbreaking, unimaginably candid, often outrageous, and ultimately triumphant, Uprooted does not relax its spell and frisson until its final remarkable sentence. This is a courageous, necessary book by a master storyteller.
— Joseph Bathanti, North Carolina Poet Laureate (2012-2014) & author of Too Glorious to Even Long for on Certain Days
Uprooted is a compelling meditation on families — those we are born into, those that choose us, and those we create ourselves. With fierce honesty, this memoir investigates complex and even contradictory relationships between mothers and daughters. Beautiful and heartbreaking by turns, S. B. Long invites readers to experience her loss and longing, and ultimately the joy of finding a place and people to call her own.
— Zackary Vernon, author of Our Bodies Electric
Hi. I’m Dr. Sarah Long
We live in a moment of profound disconnection from place, from each other, and from our own interior lives. The systems we inhabit reward speed, efficiency, and productivity. They leave little room for the slow work of making sense of what happens to us.
My work sits at the intersection of expressive writing, computational linguistics, and narrative medicine. It builds on decades of research showing that putting difficult experiences into words can improve both emotional and physical well-being. More recent work has demonstrated that as people heal, their language changes in measurable ways.
That is where my approach differs.
Using the same linguistic analysis tools that helped establish the science behind expressive writing, I help people see how their stories are changing, where meaning is emerging, and how their writing is moving toward narrative coherence. In plain language, I show you what your words may be revealing that you cannot yet see from inside your own story.
The goal is not to erase pain, but to help the body recognize that the story no longer requires constant vigilance. The result of this work is often a nervous system that can finally stand down and a body that feels better.
I am a full professor of Rhetoric and Technical Writing at Appalachian State University, author of Uprooted: A Memoir of Belonging and Becoming, and founder of The Writing Cure.
Book Me
Have Me on Your Show
Looking for a guest who'll go where most won't? I talk about the night I traded a weapon for a pen, the forty years of science proving writing can rewire a grieving brain, and why your discomfort was never a disorder to begin with. Expect candor, a little dark humor, and takeaways your listeners can use before the episode ends.
Host a Reading
Bring me in for a reading that won't stay on the page. From Uprooted: A Memoir of Belonging and Becoming, I'll read, share the true stories behind it, and deliver a craft talk on writing and using writing as medicine your guests can immediately apply to their own lives.
Bring me to your Campus
or festival
As a memoirist and full professor of writing, I bridge two rooms that rarely meet: the craft of telling a hard story well, and the neuroscience of why telling it heals. I read, lecture, and lead generative workshops on memoir, narrative medicine, and the page as a place to survive. Equal parts art and evidence.
