Celebrate Disability Pride

Rachel Kolb was born profoundly deaf the same year that the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was passed, and she grew up as part of the first generation of deaf people with legal rights to accessibility services. Still, from a young age, she contorted herself to expectations set by a world that prioritizes hearing people. So she learned to speak through speech therapy and to piece together missing sounds through lipreading and an eventual cochlear implant, all while finding clarity and meaning in American Sign Language (ASL) and written literature. Now in Articulate, Kolb blends personal narrative with cultural commentary to explore the different layers of deafness, language, and voice. She deconstructs multisensory experiences of language, examining the cultural importance hearing people attach to sound, the inner labyrinths of speech therapy, the murkiness of lipreading, and her lifelong intimacy with written English.

Blue violet : haint spaces’ is the debut poetry book of Samar Jade. Samar weaves experiences, personal, collective, and ancestral that haunt their queer, disabled, and Black body. ‘Blue violet : haint spaces’ presents a narrative in the key of the Gothic South, a music that sings in the darkened corners of wide, open spaces.

Imagine a vastly more inclusive Regency period, one in which queer and disabled people are given respect and seen in all their humanity. This is the world of Georgina Pace, a provocateur and socialite known for loving and leaving many women. When a friend is cheated by a gaming house, Georgina puts everything on the line to help him, and in doing so meets the first woman who is immune to her charms.

Incredibly resilient and determined to rewrite the possibilities of life with a chronic illness, Penny is ready to leave her family behind and go to college by herself, accompanied by a snazzy new wheelchair and a backpack full of confidence. When she meets the charming actor CJ, who is studying the same course, there’s an immediate spark. But Penny worries that her life isn’t fast-paced enough for CJ and assumes they’re better off as friends. But Penny and CJ find themselves inspiring each other, and gradually discover, as they put their feelings under the microscope, that leaning on another person can be a sign of strength, not weakness.

Our internal gremlins have a way of shaping our realities, dictating our boundaries (or lack thereof), and silencing our authentic voices. But in ‘Dating disability: 15 stories of dealing with the BS and building confidence’, Emily Goodson invites readers to explore her experiences with romance, relationships, and a relentless pursuit of self-acceptance.

A recent graduate of the Parasol Academy for Exceptional Nannies and Governesses has her first job lead her to a ship on which she must protect a young viscount. A series of magical mishaps means the boy is kidnapped by the Fae, and Miss Hermina Davenport is transported to another vessel, helmed by Phineas O’Connell. While she tries to figure out how to find her charge, there’s no harm in spending time helping the captain with manners and navigating his stammer in high society. That is, until supernatural and military forces descend on their increasingly intimate world.

Brilliant and innovative, Rob Macaisa Colgate’s debut poetry collection, Hardly Creatures, takes the form–visually and metaphorically–of an accessible art museum. Through nine sections that act as gallery rooms, the book shepherds the reader through the radiance and mess of the disability community.

Dorothe Bartleby has one more chance to pass her committee exam before she’s kicked out of her higher magic program. Between her advisor’s suggestion to try a new methodology and her anxiety-fueled panic attacks, it won’t be easy. Then, students with disabilities start disappearing from campus, and administrators aren’t taking it seriously. Bartleby can focus on polishing her research project or risk expulsion by digging deeper into the disappearances, but with a prophecy foretelling her greatest failure, she fears that whatever she does will end in disaster.

Lachi is an award-winning musician and leader who awakens the world to this truth: Disability has long shaped our culture and is an identity worth brazenly celebrating. In this book, Lachi welcomes readers into the vibrant world of Disability Culture, centering identity, innovation, and unapologetic pride. I Identify as Blind pulses with energy. Through magnetic storytelling, pop-culture deep dives, and historical insight, Lachi challenges mainstream views on disability with humor, heart, and high fashion. She reveals how the adaptability of visionaries with disabilities throughout the years have always driven progress.

Kelli Reynolds is an autistic storyteller, living on a planet where a generative AI company owns all creative media. She works for them, editing stories for TV, and has a safe life. Until an ex comes into the picture asking for dangerous help.

Software engineer Anna Werner lives at a rapid clip, relishing her work and adopted city as much as her early morning runs. All comes undone on a sweaty August evening when, in the course of a 20-minute commute, Anna goes from worrying vaguely over a sore shoulder to staggering her way into an ambulance. She has suffered a spinal stroke. Over the coming months, her parents join the insurance man in telling her to get ready for life in a group home. The only person who recognizes what Anna is still capable of is Batul al-Jaberi, a recent Syrian immigrant who meets Anna while doing her rounds as a janitor at the hospital. Batul is applying to medical school, where she hopes to regain control of a life hijacked by her family’s flight from persecution in the early days of the Arab Spring. At first the friendship is what Anna and Batul each need to regain mobility. But as their relationship deepens, Batul finds she must choose between her family and Anna–a choice that will force both women to rewrite their notions of loyalty.

Your fake relationship shouldn’t come with chronic feelings. Skylar is done with offline relationships-especially romantic ones. Living with chronic illness means she’s heard it all before: unreliable, high-maintenance, too much. She’d rather spend her free time in her online chronic pain support group, and lately, she can’t help but notice Pike, the hot new guy with a penchant for broody poetry. When a chaotic night in the group forces her to pose as his girlfriend, she reluctantly agrees to keep up the charade in real life.

Sara Nović’s early years were filled with music, Bible study, and a strong desire to fit in. But when she failed her school’s mandated hearing test, her worldview was thrown into chaos. Desperate not to be marked as different, she told no one, staying in the hearing world for as long as she could by brute force. Eventually unable to ignore the fact that she was deaf, Nović sought out other deaf people and was welcomed into a tight knit community rooted in the beauty and joy of American Sign Language. Nović realized that rather than maintaining the facade of her old life or trying to straddle two worlds, she would need to cultivate a life in the space between. Now the mother of two young sons–one, biological and hearing, the other, adopted and deaf–Nović reflects on her life both before and after parenthood. She’s raising her children within the deaf world, offering them things her younger self needed, all the while knowing that as her children grow, their own paths will branch off from hers in ways she cannot fully predict or plan for.

A dazzling debut novel about a young woman’s vexed coming of age in a traditional Azerbaijani community in Russia, grappling under the weight of Muslim patriarchal norms and a debilitating neurological condition.

Andrew Gurza is seriously hot. They’re also seriously disabled. Having spent a lifetime navigating the bars, clubs and apps of the queer scene, they’ve learned a thing or two about sparking queer crip joy amidst the hellscape of ableism, microaggressions and ‘pity sex.’ With advice on everything from sexual autonomy and self-pleasure to date-prep and disability disclosure, this is both a self-care bible and an urgent call for the queer community to do better.

Twin A and Twin B. That’s what Michael and Sal’s neuroscientist father irreverently calls them. The boys are born moments apart, but baby Sal’s brain scan shows a bleed. He has severe cerebral palsy and intellectual disabilities. Told through multiple perspectives–Gabe, the boys’ father; Hannah, their mother; and Michael–this debut novel follows the Mitchell family from the boys’ infancy to the cusp of adulthood as they all try to interpret what Sal, who speaks only eight words, is thinking and feeling … Before Michael leaves for college, the twins spend a final week together at a summer camp for people with disabilities, and Sal does something that changes their lives forever.

Inspired by a true story of one of the first female horse divers, Sonora explores a world of daring feats and extraordinary adventures set in the heyday of the American carnival scene. This book vividly captures the spirit of a brave woman who defied societal norms to follow her dreams, diving into the unknown with courage and resilience.

Upward Bound is not a place anyone dreams of spending their days. The dreary adult daycare center for Los Angeles’s disabled community is, for many of its clients and staff, a place of last resort. This includes Carlos, a young aide who…works there alongside his beloved sister Delia; Jorge, the gentle nonverbal giant… Tom, a beautiful young man with cerebral palsy, who pines for Ann, the summer lifeguard at the center’s pool… then there’s Mike, Upward Bound’s director who came to L.A. to pursue an acting career but now channels his passion into staging an impressive holiday show starring the center’s sorely underestimated clients. Framing these interlocking narratives…is the riveting and sometimes ironic testimony of Walter, a recent community college graduate who, after a family tragedy, must return to the company of his disabled peers.

The Way Disabled People Love Each Other is a fierce crip reckoning with all the ways disabled people love each other, in all our complexity. A book that will speak to any kind of griever, but particularly disabled BIPOC queer trans ones sitting with the endless mass grief and possibility of this time, and those with violent family from whom we still yearn to claw out beauty from the trauma rubble. It’s a road map for survivors looking for something that’s neither a happy Hollywood ending nor a transformative justice fairy tale–not the healing we wished for, but the healing we find anyway. This collection is a rigorous, rueful documentation of a specific time of pandemic fascist grief and possibility. Brimming with odes, elegies, and mourning songs, these poems sparkle like switchblades and offer new possibilities for love, grief, and memory.