We’re Still Here: Disabled Writers on Claiming Space

Join The Writer’s Desk for a special virtual event to commemorate Disability Pride Month! “We’re Still Here: Disabled Writers on Claiming Space” premieres on Thursday, July 23, 2026, with authors Khairani Barokka (Annah, Infinite), Emily Rapp Black (I Would Die If I Were You: Notes on Art and Truth-Telling), and Rob Macaisa Colgate (Hardly Creatures), moderated by Sarah Fawn Montgomery (Nerve: Unlearning Workshop Ableism to Develop Your Disabled Writing Practice).

Disability has long been ignored or invalidated in publishing and literary spaces, many disabled writers discounted altogether or pressured to write for abled audiences if they hope to succeed. Current social and political attacks on disability rights continue to erase disabled people from public conversation and increase pressure to perform disability in certain ways to gain acceptance. In this roundtable, four leading disabled writers discuss equity in publishing, examining the challenges disabled writers face, as well as strategies for claiming their identities on and off the page.

This online event on YouTube is free and open to all. It begins at 7:00 p.m. ET and will last around an hour. Be sure to check out our Disability Pride Month Reading List, which includes books by the panelists.

Moderator Bio

Sarah Fawn Montgomery is the author of Quite Mad: An American Pharma Memoir, which The Atlantic says “exemplifies a nuanced approach to life with mental illness” and The Paris Review describes as “the wakeup call that we need.” She is also the author of the essay collection Halfway from Home, winner of a Nautilus Book Award for lyric prose, the craft text Nerve: Unlearning Workshop Ableism to Develop Your Disabled Writing Practice, the flash collection Abbreviate, and three poetry chapbooks. Fathom is forthcoming with the Propel Disability Poetry Book Series. She is an associate professor at Bridgewater State University and the founder and editor in chief of Nerve to Write, a magazine for disabled, chronically ill, and neurodivergent writers.

Panelist Bios

Khairani Barokka (b. 1985) is a writer, artist, and editor from Jakarta, based in London and working internationally. She has a PhD by Practice in Visual Cultures and has been a UNFPA Indonesian Young Leader Driving Social Change; a Delfina Foundation associate artist; an Artforum must-see; board member of UAL’s Special Board for Archives, Museums, and Libraries; associate artist at the UK’s National Centre for Writing; and editor of Modern Poetry in Translation. In 2023, Barokka was shortlisted for the Asian Women of Achievement Awards. Most recently, she cocurated the Disabled Legacies festival for the Paul Mellon Centre and directed four short films under the Kerokan Pol project for Grand Union, on Southeast Asian crip-disabled intimacies. Her books include Indigenous Species (Tilted Axis); Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back (Nine Arches, as coeditor); Ultimatum Orangutan (Nine Arches), shortlisted for the 2022 Barbellion Prize; and 2024’s amuk (Nine Arches), longlisted for the Jhalak Poetry Prize. Annah, Infinite (Tilted Axis, 2025) is her creative nonfiction debut, based on a fourteen-year art and writing project, and is a Bookseller Expert Pick.

Rob Macaisa Colgate (he/she/they) is the author of the poetry collection Hardly Creatures (Tin House, 2025), winner of the Chicago Review of Books Award and longlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize, and the verse drama My Love Is Water (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2025). A 2026 Creative Capital, 2025 NEA, and 2024 Ruth Lilly fellow, he serves as the managing poetry editor at Foglifter and lives in Chicago.

Emily Rapp Black is the author of Poster Child: A Memoir (Bloomsbury USA); The Still Point of the Turning World (Penguin Press), which was a New York Times bestseller, an Editor’s Pick, and a finalist for the PEN-USA Award; Sanctuary (Random House), a New York Times Editor’s Pick; Frida Kahlo and My Left Leg (Nottinghill Editions/New York Review of Books); and I Would Die If I Were You: Notes on Art and Truth-Telling (Counterpoint, 2026). A former Fulbright scholar, she was educated at Harvard University, Trinity College Dublin, Saint Olaf College, and the University of Texas at Austin, where she was a James A. Michener Fellow in Fiction and Poetry. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, she has received awards and fellowships from the Rona Jaffe Foundation; the Jentel Arts Foundation; the Corporation of Yaddo; the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, where she was a winter writing fellow; Fundacion Valparaiso in Mojácar, Spain; and Bucknell University, where she was the Philip Roth fiction writer in residence. Her work has appeared in Vogue; The New York Times; Die Zeit; The Times (London); Lenny Letter; The Sun; Time; The Boston Globe; The Wall Street Journal; O, The Oprah Magazine; the Los Angeles Times, and many other publications. She is currently professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside, where she also teaches in the School of Medicine. She lives in Southern California.