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Perspectives on Disability: Nonfiction

By Andrew Hazard

A vast body of nonfiction writing about disabilities and the disabled community has appeared in the last few years, the overwhelming majority of it by authors who are themselves disabled. This is a treasure trove, selected by our library staff.

  • Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body

    2020 by Taussig, Rebekah

    A pull-no-punches memoir about life in a wheelchair. Rebekah Taussig doesn't claim to speak for everyone with a disability: “I would be doing us all a great disservice if I led you to believe that the conversation starts and ends with bodies and experiences that look just like mine." But she does speak of her own experience and shows a glimpse into her life with “a body that doesn’t work."

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  • Haben: The Deafblind Woman Who Conquered Harvard Law

    2019 by Girma, Haben

    The incredible life story of Haben Girma, the first Deafblind graduate of Harvard Law School, and her amazing journey from isolation to the world stage. This moving, uplifting, and inspiring memoir is reflective of a person who champions access and dignity for all.

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  • Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century

    2020

    This collection of essays from disabled writers celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act focuses on issues such as disabled performers in the theater and the everyday lives of the community. "The collection sheds insight on topics that are rarely explored in mainstream works, including the difficulties of finding adaptive clothing, the dangerous mindset of the cure mentality, and the high rates of disability among LGBTQ people. Overall, Wong urges people with disabilities to expect more and deserve more" (Library Journal). A follow-up volume, Disability Intimacy, and a young readers edition of Disability Visibility have since been released.

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  • The Pretty One: On Life, Pop Culture, Disability, and Other Reasons to Fall in Love With Me

    2019 by Brown, Keah

    From the disability rights advocate and creator of the #DisabledAndCute viral campaign, a thoughtful, inspiring, and charming collection of essays exploring what it means to be Black and disabled in a mostly able-bodied white America. Keah Brown’s contemporary and relatable voice for the disabled is inspiring. With clear, fresh, and light-hearted prose, these essays explore everything from the author’s relationship with her able-bodied identical twin (called “the pretty one” by friends) to navigating romance.

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  • Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice

    2018 by Piepzna-Samarasinha, Leah Lakshmi

    In this collection of essays, Lambda Literary Award-winning writer and longtime activist and performance artist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha explores the politics and realities of disability justice, a movement that features the lives and leadership of sick and disabled queer, trans, Black, and brown people, with knowledge and gifts for all.

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  • Neurotribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity

    2015 by Silberman, Steve

    Explaining society's changing understanding of autism--and Autistic people's understanding of themselves--requires a nonfiction epic, encompassing everything from the experiences of individual families to pop culture milestones (the good, bad, and ugly of the movie Rain Man gets its own chapter). This book is also a triumph of journalistic storytelling--probing, compassionate, and immensely readable. A seminal work whose influence on writing about disability and and the idea of neurodiversity is impossible to overstate. Suggested by Andrew.

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  • Golem Girl: A Memoir

    2020 by Lehrer, Riva

    Born with spina bifida, author/artist Riva Lehrer has been exceptional all her life, and she has lived bravely, challenging what many call normalcy. For more on her creative process, be sure to check out the short film The Paper Mirror, It can be streamed on Kanopy. Suggested by Sharon.

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  • Diary of a Young Naturalist

    2021 by McAnulty, Dara

    A remarkable young man begins to find his voice as an author and activist, while also having struggles that will resonate with anyone who has ever been a teenager, Autistic or otherwise. If this were fiction, it would be a coming-of-age masterpiece. Readers WILL fall in love with Dara's warm, neurodiverse family. Suggested by Andrew.

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  • I'm Telling the Truth, But I'm Lying: Essays

    by Ikpi, Bassey

    Spoken word poet Bassey Ikpi bares her own truths and lies for us all to behold with radical honesty. As Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy, stated, "We will not think or talk about mental health or normalcy the same after reading this momentous art object moonlighting as a colossal collection of essays.”

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  • There Plant Eyes: A Personal and Cultural History of Blindness

    2021 by Godin, M. Leona

    Leona Godin interweaves the history of blindness in human societies with her own story of gradually losing her sight. “She traces two ideas: that being unable to see brings deep insight and that the blind can show how little the sighted truly see. Godin counters these stereotypes with her own experiences and with surprising details from the lives of blind activists such as Helen Keller, to argue that 'there are as many ways of being blind as there are of being sighted.’” (The New Yorker) Suggested by Chris.

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  • Being Seen: One Deafblind Woman's Fight to End Ableism

    2021 by Sjunneson, Elsa

    Elsa Sjunneson is a Deafblind, bisexual award-winning author, professor, and activist. In her memoir and social critique hybrid, she provides powerful, keen observations and thought-provoking analyses of the ways in which society and media (particularly books and film) shape our perceptions of disability and further ingrain ableism. Suggested by Rummanah.

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  • Head Above Water: Reflections on Illness

    2023 by Shammarī, Shahd

    Alshammari calls her multiple sclerosis a “random disability, "one defined by “multiplicity, vagueness,” unpredictable in its manifestations yet always present. That need to use language to describe what words can never quite capture has been a constant for the author as she studied literature in England, then returned to her native Kuwait to teach. She explores what disability means to her students, and how they engage with it in the fiction of Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf, and R.J. Palacio. Suggested by Andrew.

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  • The Anti-Ableist Manifesto

    2024 by Yu, Tiffany

    “An essential field guide to help people learn about ableism, how to navigate the ways it permeates everyday life, and what to do about it...The Anti-Ableist Manifesto will be required reading for decades to come” (Eric Garcia). As befits a book that began as a series of TikTok videos, Tiffany Yu keeps things as user-friendly as possible here, with chapters like “Not All Disabilities Are Apparent” and “Support Disability Entrepreneurship” as well as key terms in bold type, bulleted lists, and suggested discussion questions. “Diversify Your Feed” considers the promise of social media itself, while warning of a new era of “digital eugenics.” Suggested by Andrew.

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  • Unfit Parent

    2025 by Slice, Jessica

    Becoming a parent made Jessica Slice (coauthor of Dateable: Swiping Right, Hooking Up, and Settling Down While Chronically Ill and Disabled) think about her disability differently, and vice versa. She found herself navigating systems that all reflected the assumption that those who use wheelchairs neither have nor should have children. Along the way, she began to understand that whether they cooccur or not, disability and parenthood BOTH force people to be dependent on others in ways our hyper-individualistic society tells them they should be ashamed of. Removing that stigma can radically change who is “unfit.” Suggested by Andrew.

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  • Sipping Dom Pérignon Through a Straw

    2023 by Ndopu, Eddie

    South African activist Eddie Ndopu is an impressive person – a Global Changemaker at 18, Amnesty International’s Regional Youth Coordinator for Africa, etc. Yet the overriding theme of his memoir is the pointlessness of institutions trying to change just enough to accommodate a few “exceptional” disabled individuals while leaving the underlying structures of ableism intact. The year he spent at Oxford University featured the nonstop irony of being hailed as a trailblazer in spaces that resisted his presence in every way possible. Suggested by Andrew .

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  • Against Technoableism

    2023 by Shew, Ashley

    “When people pose disability as a problem, they look for a solution.” The history of assistive technologies has often been one of trying to “fix” people and return them to an idealized able-bodied state that in reality has never been and never will be the human norm. Working from ideas developed while teaching future engineers to actually think about the human beings they desire to “help,” Ashley Shew argues for recognizing that disabled people are the best experts on what they need, which is often for society as a whole to “build things to be as inclusive as possible now instead of trying to fix them later.” Suggested by Andrew.

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  • Disability Pride

    2022 by Mattlin, Ben

    “Before I started research for this book, I thought I understood what the disability movement was all about.” That’s quite a statement coming from Ben Mattlin, a “lifelong wheelchair user” who has been fighting for (and writing about) disability rights since before the 1990 passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act. This book reflects his amazement at the rise of autistic self-advocacy, the “Disability Justice framework” that recognizes ableism as inseparable from other forms of oppression, and above all the way “the idea of disability has shifted from a medical signifier to an emblem of cultural identity.” In other words, a community. Suggested by Andrew.

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  • Art Is Art

    2023

    My late wife believed deeply in building community and in giving the freedom to make art to people it had long been denied to. Therefore, I was struck by this volume “celebrat[ing] forty years of disabled artists’ access to unbridled expression at Creativity Explored,” an arts cooperative based in San Francisco’s Mission District. The inventiveness on display here, in media ranging from watercolors to life-sized puppets, vaporizes the patronizing notion of outsider art as a separate (and implicitly less sophisticated) category. Suggested by Andrew.

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