July is Disability Pride Month! To help bookstores and libraries celebrate, we’ve put together this roundup of poetry and nonfiction to spotlight all month and year-round. (We publish longer reading lists each month as well—check out our most recent reading list for Disability Pride Month for more ideas!)
Poetry
Mother Minotaur by Sarah Ahrens
Finishing Line Press | February 20, 2026
Distributor: Ingram
ISBN: 979-8-89990-359-5
This poetry collection “explores disability and motherhood through the lens of the Minotaur myth … tracing a narrative thread that runs back to the origin of her hearing loss and her struggle to understand her young children’s differently wired brains.”
Splice by Anthony Borruso
Trio House Press | July 1, 2025
Distributor: Ingram
ISBN: 978-1949487343
Borruso’s collection “ultimately explores our constant cycle of reinvention and imitation, an engine that both holds us back and moves us forward.”
Nazar Boy by Tarik Dobbs
Haymarket Books | June 11, 2024
Distributor: Consortium Book Sales & Distribution
ISBN: 9798888900895
Dobbs’s poetry collection “explores surveillance, queerness, disability, race, and working-class identity in post-9/11 America.”
E by Noa Micaela Fields
Nightboat Books | January 13, 2026
Distributor: Consortium Book Sales & Distribution
ISBN: 978-1-64362-293-4
This poetry collection “practices mishearing as a bodily reworking of language alongside the poet’s hormonal transition, stretching the upper limits of homophonic translation to unleash the unexpected queer resonances of Louis Zukofsky’s ‘A.’”
Close Escapes by Stephen Kuusisto
Copper Canyon Press | April 22, 2025
Distributor: Consortium Book Sales & Distribution
ISBN: 9781556596896
In Kuusisto’s third poetry collection, as he “moves forward through meditations on beauty, ‘dark joy,’ loss, aging, and the afterlife, he also reaches back, talking to writers, musicians, and thinkers of the past—Orwell, Marvin Bell, Salvatore Quasimodo.”
Gold Star by Emma McKenna
Book*hug Press | May 5, 2026
Distributor: Independent Publishers Group
ISBN: 978-1-77166-974-0
The poems in this collection “look at the physical and emotional implications of trauma but also reveal how being bisexual and disabled can be sources of resilience, joy, and creativity.”
Spoke the Dark Matter by Michelle Whittaker
Sundress Publications | August 27, 2024
Distributor: Ingram
ISBN: 9781951979652
Whittaker’s collection is “an intimately carved, haunting window into the speaker’s Jamaican American heritage and her struggles with illness, healthcare, and romantic relationships.”
Nonfiction
The Braille Encyclopedia: Brief Essays on Altered Sight by Naomi Cohn
Rose Metal Press | October 23, 2024
Distributor: Itasca Books
ISBN: 978-1-941628-33-1
This memoir about progressive vision loss “shapeshifts between lyric essay and prose poetry and traverses the divides between lived experience, history, and scientific knowledge.”
Jelly, Baby: Essays on Disability and Vulnerability by Therese Estacion
Book*hug Press | April 28, 2026
Distributor: Independent Publishers Group
ISBN: 978-1-77166-964-1
In this collection of lyric and poetic essays, Estacion “confronts her own internalized ableism and unpacks how she has come to terms with disability in all its complexity.”
Wayfinding by Renee Gilmore
Trio House Press | October 1, 2025
Distributor: Ingram
ISBN: 9781949487626
In a memoir told through “a series of car trips and postcards from the road,” Gilmore “confronts the impetus behind her wanderlust: a lifetime shaped by loss, betrayal, and sexual violence.”
In Hospital Environments: Essays on Illness and Philosophy by Jake Goldsmith
Sagging Meniscus Press | May 1, 2024
Distributor: Asterism Books
ISBN: 9781952386930
According to P. J. Blumenthal, this essay collection “should be made required reading for the chronically ill and the chronically healthy in the school of life.”
Saving Face by Effy Redman
Vine Leaves Press | March 19, 2024
Distributor: Ingram
ISBN: 978-3-98832-049-0
This memoir “honors the grace of a face that stands out in a crowd, defying societal beauty norms.”
