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Disabled Writer Recs from Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
3 participants (179 books)
Overview
Every time I read The Future is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes, and Mourning Songs by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, I tell myself, "I'm going to make a list and read all the authors they recommend!" This is that list.
The challenge is to read more disabled writers. I'm not setting any time limit or deadline. I'm not saying you have to read every prompt on this list. Even broadening our bookshelves by a single book by a single author is a win. I'm starting the list from all 30 of the writers mentioned in Chapter 10, "Disability Justice Writing, the Beauty and the Difficulty," with quotes to offer context from LLPS. I may also include writers they mention in other parts of the book, as well. When I couldn't find any books on StoryGraph from a writer they mention, I have attempted to manually add a book, zine, or journal of theirs myself.
Note on the "D-word": Many of the books we explore in this challenge may not be "about" disability, chronic illness, neurodivergence, or Deaf experiences. The authors are what LLPS considers part of "a breadth of writing that spans decades and generations, that uses the D-word and does not." Some of these writers may or may not have identified as disabled, and we can never ask them to find out for sure. Regardless, I agree with LLPS that their voices and stories have deep value in the conversations we have around disability today.
Note on book topics: And as LLPS points out, it's a very ableist privileged thing to ask disabled creators to always and only create work with disability themes, educational disability 101s, or that center nondisabled confusion/understanding in our work. If a Deaf poet like Raymond Luczak wants to write poems about queer bear nightlife or lakes in Michigan, he can do that. And if a disabled sex worker like Emi Koyama wants to write zines honoring the memory of Japanese comfort women, she can do that. They are still writing from their own unique perspectives, informed by their own multifaceted identities. Just as disability is not a monolith, no disabled person is limited to a single narrow identity or stereotype. We don't need anyone's permission to be whole fucking people.
Note on my capacity: This is a work in progress. To simplify this task and increase the odds of completing it, I may share authors out of order from how they're mentioned in the book, and I am giving myself permission to be imperfect. At the time this goes live in June of 2025, I'm proud to say my list has 30 prompts and 175 books! (Thank you, hyperfocus.)
And thank YOU for your interest in this challenge!
Excerpts from Chapter 10 that resonate for me as a disabled writer and reader, and that inspired me to create this list:
The challenge is to read more disabled writers. I'm not setting any time limit or deadline. I'm not saying you have to read every prompt on this list. Even broadening our bookshelves by a single book by a single author is a win. I'm starting the list from all 30 of the writers mentioned in Chapter 10, "Disability Justice Writing, the Beauty and the Difficulty," with quotes to offer context from LLPS. I may also include writers they mention in other parts of the book, as well. When I couldn't find any books on StoryGraph from a writer they mention, I have attempted to manually add a book, zine, or journal of theirs myself.
Note on the "D-word": Many of the books we explore in this challenge may not be "about" disability, chronic illness, neurodivergence, or Deaf experiences. The authors are what LLPS considers part of "a breadth of writing that spans decades and generations, that uses the D-word and does not." Some of these writers may or may not have identified as disabled, and we can never ask them to find out for sure. Regardless, I agree with LLPS that their voices and stories have deep value in the conversations we have around disability today.
Note on book topics: And as LLPS points out, it's a very ableist privileged thing to ask disabled creators to always and only create work with disability themes, educational disability 101s, or that center nondisabled confusion/understanding in our work. If a Deaf poet like Raymond Luczak wants to write poems about queer bear nightlife or lakes in Michigan, he can do that. And if a disabled sex worker like Emi Koyama wants to write zines honoring the memory of Japanese comfort women, she can do that. They are still writing from their own unique perspectives, informed by their own multifaceted identities. Just as disability is not a monolith, no disabled person is limited to a single narrow identity or stereotype. We don't need anyone's permission to be whole fucking people.
Note on my capacity: This is a work in progress. To simplify this task and increase the odds of completing it, I may share authors out of order from how they're mentioned in the book, and I am giving myself permission to be imperfect. At the time this goes live in June of 2025, I'm proud to say my list has 30 prompts and 175 books! (Thank you, hyperfocus.)
And thank YOU for your interest in this challenge!
Excerpts from Chapter 10 that resonate for me as a disabled writer and reader, and that inspired me to create this list:
In mainstream literature, disabled people are inspirations, tragedies, monsters, hermits, cautionary tales, plagues, warnings. We are Beth from Little Women. We are Bertha, Rochester's mad Jamaican first wife locked up in his attic in Wuthering Heights. We are symbols, and we are an absence. Rarely do we get to write our stories for ourselves, be disabled writers writing disabled characters. Our literary traditions are erased, our poets and writers dismissed with a "Oh, did she actually identify that way?" But the reality is crip writing is everywhere and crip bodies are overflowing rivers full of stories we are burning to tell.
We are so often kept apart, we disabled people, and kept from knowing each other's names. We are told not to hang out with the other kid with cerebral palsy, told to deny or downplay our disabilities or Deafness or ND. We often grow up not learning disabled history, Deaf literature, or that those are even a thing.
White genderqueer writer Meg Day wrote of meeting Laura Hershey at a Lambda Literary retreat and Laura asking Meg why she wasn't reading certain Deaf and disabled writers, saying, "these are your foremothers." I didn't know about Laura or her writing until after she died—she'd FB friend requested me but I didn't know who she was. Yet, as Laura Hershey wrote in her poem "Translating the Crip," here we are: "thriving and unwelcome, the irony of the only possible time and place." And we are writing and creating our own media whether or not the abled world can see hear read or witness us.
If you don't see your crip life in writing, you can't imagine a crip life to be.
Crip writing is a piece of driftwood I grabbed and hung on to that stopped me from going under, this pandemic two years when everyone died, my best, most-needed beloveds, the ones the world needed the most. By crip writing I mean the crip poetry and writing I read, from PDF online zines and Twitter and blogs and Instagram and more and more and more books every year we made with all our world-changing crip-lit labor. I mean writing it to make meaning out of the rage and empty, the crip bitter and fried of our friends being stolen from us. I mean writing that saves our lives and makes new ones.
Every line I write is a nocked arrow, the string pulled back, the exhale of release, the deep c*nt feeling of yes as it hits the mark, as it goes farther than we have before, to the place we knew we needed named. Alexis Pauline Gumbs once wrote, "Our future deserves a present where our truths were written," and we are writing down our crip everyday, and out of that, writing our future.
Disabled Writer Recs from Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
3 participants (179 books)
Overview
Every time I read The Future is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes, and Mourning Songs by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, I tell myself, "I'm going to make a list and read all the authors they recommend!" This is that list.
The challenge is to read more disabled writers. I'm not setting any time limit or deadline. I'm not saying you have to read every prompt on this list. Even broadening our bookshelves by a single book by a single author is a win. I'm starting the list from all 30 of the writers mentioned in Chapter 10, "Disability Justice Writing, the Beauty and the Difficulty," with quotes to offer context from LLPS. I may also include writers they mention in other parts of the book, as well. When I couldn't find any books on StoryGraph from a writer they mention, I have attempted to manually add a book, zine, or journal of theirs myself.
Note on the "D-word": Many of the books we explore in this challenge may not be "about" disability, chronic illness, neurodivergence, or Deaf experiences. The authors are what LLPS considers part of "a breadth of writing that spans decades and generations, that uses the D-word and does not." Some of these writers may or may not have identified as disabled, and we can never ask them to find out for sure. Regardless, I agree with LLPS that their voices and stories have deep value in the conversations we have around disability today.
Note on book topics: And as LLPS points out, it's a very ableist privileged thing to ask disabled creators to always and only create work with disability themes, educational disability 101s, or that center nondisabled confusion/understanding in our work. If a Deaf poet like Raymond Luczak wants to write poems about queer bear nightlife or lakes in Michigan, he can do that. And if a disabled sex worker like Emi Koyama wants to write zines honoring the memory of Japanese comfort women, she can do that. They are still writing from their own unique perspectives, informed by their own multifaceted identities. Just as disability is not a monolith, no disabled person is limited to a single narrow identity or stereotype. We don't need anyone's permission to be whole fucking people.
Note on my capacity: This is a work in progress. To simplify this task and increase the odds of completing it, I may share authors out of order from how they're mentioned in the book, and I am giving myself permission to be imperfect. At the time this goes live in June of 2025, I'm proud to say my list has 30 prompts and 175 books! (Thank you, hyperfocus.)
And thank YOU for your interest in this challenge!
Excerpts from Chapter 10 that resonate for me as a disabled writer and reader, and that inspired me to create this list:
The challenge is to read more disabled writers. I'm not setting any time limit or deadline. I'm not saying you have to read every prompt on this list. Even broadening our bookshelves by a single book by a single author is a win. I'm starting the list from all 30 of the writers mentioned in Chapter 10, "Disability Justice Writing, the Beauty and the Difficulty," with quotes to offer context from LLPS. I may also include writers they mention in other parts of the book, as well. When I couldn't find any books on StoryGraph from a writer they mention, I have attempted to manually add a book, zine, or journal of theirs myself.
Note on the "D-word": Many of the books we explore in this challenge may not be "about" disability, chronic illness, neurodivergence, or Deaf experiences. The authors are what LLPS considers part of "a breadth of writing that spans decades and generations, that uses the D-word and does not." Some of these writers may or may not have identified as disabled, and we can never ask them to find out for sure. Regardless, I agree with LLPS that their voices and stories have deep value in the conversations we have around disability today.
Note on book topics: And as LLPS points out, it's a very ableist privileged thing to ask disabled creators to always and only create work with disability themes, educational disability 101s, or that center nondisabled confusion/understanding in our work. If a Deaf poet like Raymond Luczak wants to write poems about queer bear nightlife or lakes in Michigan, he can do that. And if a disabled sex worker like Emi Koyama wants to write zines honoring the memory of Japanese comfort women, she can do that. They are still writing from their own unique perspectives, informed by their own multifaceted identities. Just as disability is not a monolith, no disabled person is limited to a single narrow identity or stereotype. We don't need anyone's permission to be whole fucking people.
Note on my capacity: This is a work in progress. To simplify this task and increase the odds of completing it, I may share authors out of order from how they're mentioned in the book, and I am giving myself permission to be imperfect. At the time this goes live in June of 2025, I'm proud to say my list has 30 prompts and 175 books! (Thank you, hyperfocus.)
And thank YOU for your interest in this challenge!
Excerpts from Chapter 10 that resonate for me as a disabled writer and reader, and that inspired me to create this list:
In mainstream literature, disabled people are inspirations, tragedies, monsters, hermits, cautionary tales, plagues, warnings. We are Beth from Little Women. We are Bertha, Rochester's mad Jamaican first wife locked up in his attic in Wuthering Heights. We are symbols, and we are an absence. Rarely do we get to write our stories for ourselves, be disabled writers writing disabled characters. Our literary traditions are erased, our poets and writers dismissed with a "Oh, did she actually identify that way?" But the reality is crip writing is everywhere and crip bodies are overflowing rivers full of stories we are burning to tell.
We are so often kept apart, we disabled people, and kept from knowing each other's names. We are told not to hang out with the other kid with cerebral palsy, told to deny or downplay our disabilities or Deafness or ND. We often grow up not learning disabled history, Deaf literature, or that those are even a thing.
White genderqueer writer Meg Day wrote of meeting Laura Hershey at a Lambda Literary retreat and Laura asking Meg why she wasn't reading certain Deaf and disabled writers, saying, "these are your foremothers." I didn't know about Laura or her writing until after she died—she'd FB friend requested me but I didn't know who she was. Yet, as Laura Hershey wrote in her poem "Translating the Crip," here we are: "thriving and unwelcome, the irony of the only possible time and place." And we are writing and creating our own media whether or not the abled world can see hear read or witness us.
If you don't see your crip life in writing, you can't imagine a crip life to be.
Crip writing is a piece of driftwood I grabbed and hung on to that stopped me from going under, this pandemic two years when everyone died, my best, most-needed beloveds, the ones the world needed the most. By crip writing I mean the crip poetry and writing I read, from PDF online zines and Twitter and blogs and Instagram and more and more and more books every year we made with all our world-changing crip-lit labor. I mean writing it to make meaning out of the rage and empty, the crip bitter and fried of our friends being stolen from us. I mean writing that saves our lives and makes new ones.
Every line I write is a nocked arrow, the string pulled back, the exhale of release, the deep c*nt feeling of yes as it hits the mark, as it goes farther than we have before, to the place we knew we needed named. Alexis Pauline Gumbs once wrote, "Our future deserves a present where our truths were written," and we are writing down our crip everyday, and out of that, writing our future.
