The Disability Visibility Project has announced the publication of a valuable new anthology of writing by prominent people in the disability advocacy and self-advocacy communities.
Fellow blogger Alice Wong (also on WordPress), creator of the Disability Visibility project, has announced the long-awaited publication of her anthology, Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the 21st Century. In her announcement, she has included forthcoming online book events.
The anthology comprises four parts:
- Being
- Becoming
- Doing
- Connecting.
The anthology embraces the story-telling tradition, but all from the multiple perspectives of people with a wide range of disabilities. Famous authors include Haben Girma (whose memoir I reviewed earlier) and Maysoon Zayid. In her introduction, Ms. Wong tells of how she grew up seeing very few images portraying people with disabilities going about their everyday lives. She asked herself how her worldview would have been different “if I had seen someone like me as a glamorous, confident adult.” She adds, “As I grew older, discovering a community of disabled people and learning our stories gave me a sense of what is possible.” With that, Ms. Wong began to collect and save stories that were meaningful to her. She connected with StoryCorps and created the Disability Visibility Project to preserve these stories, archiving them at the Library of Congress.
Non-disabled readers will learn many aspects of living with a disability—and support these worthwhile authors in the process.
Disability Visibility is available in both print and e-book formats.
Janusz Korczak - Pediatrician, Writer, Educator, Orphanage Director, and Children's Advocate 