‘Welcome to Our World’: Collection of Stories Sheds Light on Disabilities
These personal essays offer inspiration, grief, and a firsthand look at the disabled experience thirty years after the passage of ADA.
July 27, 2020
2:05 PM
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“There are not enough self-identified Deaf, chronically ill, and neurodiverse people in publishing,” Alice Wong, editor of Disability Visibility: First Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century, writes in an introduction to the book. “This directly impacts what gets published, who gets published, and industry assumptions of what disabled and non-disabled readers are hungry for.”
Disability Visibility, a compilation of thirty-seven personal essays by writers of diverse races, classes, ethnicities, sexualities, and job titles, hopes to help reverse this.
“These stories,” Wong writes, “do not seek to explain the meaning of disability or elicit empathy. Rather, they show disabled people simply being in our own words, by our own accounts. . . .. Disability is pain, struggle, brilliance, abundance, and joy.”
Every piece in Disability Visibility evokes a similar tenacity, some gut-wrenching and others inspiring.
In addition to these emotions the essays in Disability Visibility convey the frustration that, thirty years after [...]