S180.
Mutant, Monster, Misfit, Myself: Writing the Disabled / Chronically Ill Body, Sponsored by AWP
Saturday, March 11, 2023
12:10 pm to 1:25 pm
Five disabled and/or chronically ill writers of poetry and memoir talk about how their body influences the way they write, their subject matter, even how they impact their genres and efforts towards publicity. How do we claim / activate our disability or illness? What do we disclose? We’ll discuss how our work has changed over time, how our relationships with disability have changed, how we accommodate or resist the gaze of abled readers, and how disability / illness manifests in genre, line, metaphor. This event will be livestreamed. ASL interpretation and live captioning will be provided.
Participants
Jeannine Hall Gailey served as second Poet Laureate of Redmond, Washington. She's the author of six books of poetry, including Field Guide to the End of the World, which won the Moon City Book Prize, and the upcoming Flare, Corona from BOA Editions. PR for Poets is her latest nonfiction book.
Sandra Beasley is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Made to Explode, and Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life, a disability memoir. She edited Vinegar and Char: Verse from the Southern Foodways Alliance. She lives in Washington, DC.
Paul Guest is the author of four collections of poetry and a memoir. His work has appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, New England Review, and numerous other publications. A Guggenheim Fellow and Whiting Award winner, he lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Rosebud Ben-Oni won the 2019 Alice James Award for If This Is the Age We End Discovery and is the author of turn around, BRXGHT XYXS. She received fellowships from New York Foundation for the Arts and CantoMundo; her work has been commissioned by the National September 11 Memorial and Museum in New York City.
Jennifer Givhan is a Mexican-American poet, NEA fellowship recipient, and author of Landscape with Headless Mama (2015 Pleiades Editors’ Prize), Protection Spell (2016 Miller Williams Poetry Prize Series, U of Arkansas Press), and Girl with Death Mask (2017 Blue Light Books Prize, Indiana U Press).
