Disability Pride Month celebrates people with disabilities and recognizes that disability is a natural, normal part of human diversity. Check out these books to learn more about disabled writers’ stories and the disability justice movement.
All Our Families: Disability Lineage and the Future of Kinship by Jennifer Natalya FinkAll Our Families: Finding Our Disability Lineages argues that disability is stigmatized because it is delineated-excised from our understanding of family, cut out from the story a family tells about itself, and proposes how finding and integrating disability in our family would transform our lived experiences of both family and disability.
Being Heumann : An Unrepentant Memoir of a Disability Rights Activist by Judith E HeumannOne of the most influential disability rights activists in US history tells her personal story of fighting for the right to receive an education, have a job, and just be human. Candid, intimate, and irreverent, Judy Heumann's memoir about resistance to exclusion invites readers to imagine and make real a world in which we all belong.
Disability Pride : Dispatches From a Post-ADA World by Ben MattlinAn eye-opening portrait of the diverse disability community as it is today and how attitudes, activism, and representation have evolved since the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).
Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories From the Twenty-First Century by Alice Wong (editor)One in five people in the United States lives with a disability. Some disabilities are visible, others less apparent--but all are underrepresented in media and popular culture. Now, just in time for the 30th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, activist Alice Wong brings together this urgent, galvanizing collection of contemporary essays by disabled people.
Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation by Eli ClareWith a poet's devotion to truth and an activist's demand for justice, Clare deftly unspools the multiple histories from which our ever-evolving sense of self unfolds. His essays weave together memoir, history, and political thinking to explore meanings and experiences of home: home as place, community, bodies, identity, and activism. At the root of Clare's exploration of environmental destruction and capitalism, sexuality and institutional violence, gender and the body politic, is a call for social justice movements that are truly accessible to everyone.
Leg: The Story of a Limb and the Boy Who Grew From It: A Memoir by Greg MarshallA hilarious and poignant memoir grappling with family, disability, and coming of age in two closets--as a gay man and as a man living with cerebral palsy. Leg is an extraordinarily funny and insightful memoir from a daring new voice. Packed with outrageous stories of a singular childhood, it is also a startlingly original examination of what it means to transform when there are parts of yourself you can't change, a moving portrait of a family in crisis, and a tale of resilience of spirit. In Marshall's deft hands, we see a story both personal and universal--of being young and wanting the world, even when the world doesn't feel like yours to want.
Losing Music: A Memoir by John CotterA devastating account of the author's experience with the debilitating condition known as Ménière's Disease that sheds urgent, bracingly honest light on both the taboos surrounding disability and the limits of medical science.
Loving Our Own Bones: Disability Wisdom and the Spiritual Subversiveness of Knowing Ourselves Whole by Julia Watts BelserA spiritual companion and political manifesto that cuts through objectification and inspiration alike to offer a powerful new account of disability in biblical narrative and contemporary culture.
Sipping Dom Pérignon Through a Straw : Reimagining Success as a Disabled Achiever by Eddie NdopuGlobal humanitarian Eddie Ndopu's rousing memoir about being both profoundly disabled and profoundly successful without trading one for the other. By his early twenties, he had rocketed through every boundary put in front of him--a queer, Black wheelchair user--challenging bias at the highest echelons of power and prestige. Written with his one good finger, Eddie's vibrant prose delivers a clarion call to underdogs everywhere to stop climbing mountains and start moving them instead.
The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight by Andrew LelandA witty, winning, and revelatory personal narrative of the author's transition from sightedness to blindness and his quest to learn all he can about blindness as a distinct and rich culture all its own. Part memoir, part historical and cultural investigation, The Country of the Blind represents Leland's determination not to merely survive this transition, but to grow from it--to seek out and revel in that which makes blindness enlightening.
The Disability Experience : Working Toward Belonging by Hannalora LeavittPeople with disabilities (PWDs) have the same aspirations for their lives as you do for yours. The difference is that PWDs don't have the same access to education, employment, housing, transportation and healthcare in order to achieve their goals. In "The Disability Experience" you'll meet people with different kinds of disabilities, and you'll begin to understand the ways PWDs have been ignored, reviled and marginalized throughout history. The book also celebrates the triumphs and achievements of PWDs and shares the powerful stories of those who have fought for change.
The Future is Disabled : prophecies, love notes, and mourning songs by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-SamarasinhaIn The Future Is Disabled, Leah Laksmi Piepzna-Samarasinha asks some provocative questions: What if, in the near future, the majority of people will be disabled--and what if that's not a bad thing? And what if disability justice and disabled wisdom are crucial to creating a future in which it's possible to survive fascism, climate change, and pandemics and to bring about liberation? Written over the course of two years of disabled isolation during the pandemic, this is a book of love letters to other disabled QTBIPOC (and those concerned about disability justice, the care crisis, and surviving the apocalypse); honour songs for kin who are gone; recipes for survival; questions and real talk about care, organizing, disabled families, and kin networks and communities; and wild brown disabled femme joy in the face of death. With passion and power, The Future Is Disabled remembers our dead and insists on our future.