We asked the many independent literary presses and magazines that make up our membership to share with us some of the literature they recommend reading in honor of Disability Pride Month, observed annually in July.
Literary Magazines
beestung | 2020
The poem “WE’VE ALL DONE THINGS WE’RE NOT SUPPOSED TO DO WITH OUR BODIES” begins, “were i to subject my brain to confession the way i do to therapy, perhaps / i would begin & end with each of your names…”
“Hail Able Bodies” by Ashley Caveda
Southeast Review | 2015
This piece begins, “No one likes a disgruntled cripple, so smile. You want others to like you. You need them to like you. You depend / on them.”
“How I Keep My Love of Music Alive as a Deaf Person” by Dawn Colclasure
Open Secrets Magazine | 2024
This essay begins, “You would think that something like music could only be enjoyed by people who can hear it. For me, losing my hearing didn’t mean the death of music like I’d thought it would.”
“Ode to Pissing” by Rob Macaisa Colgate
New England Review | 2024
This poem begins, “I go over to Elaine’s on Thursdays to lift her onto the toilet.”
The Hopkins Review | 2025
The poem “Bullhead” begins, “Because he doesn’t drink in front of them, / fishing trips are among the only times / Mom and her sisters see my grandfather / completely sober.”
Deaf Jewish Women Make Themselves Heard
Lilith | 2012
This special section from the spring 2012 issue of Lilith features writing by Caroline Block, Tzila Seewald-Russell, and more, and “explores being deaf and Jewish and female.”
“Negative Space” by Arria Deepwater
Does It Have Pockets | 2025
This story begins, “The door wore its patched-over reinforced repair with a shiny sort of broken pride. I don’t know what impression it would have made a few days earlier.”
Lilith | 2024
The spring 2024 issue of Lilith features writing on Judaism and disability by Julia Watts Belser, Ashley P. Taylor, Mariah Guevin, and more.
ANMLY | 2017
According to editor Sarah Clark, “When I put out the call for work for Glitterbrain, what I wanted the most was realness, whatever that may mean. Because neurodiverse, queer, people of color are denied what is real.”
Sinister Wisdom | 2022
Edited by Valerie Wetlaufer, Issue 125 of Sinister Wisdom features a selection of creative works from disabled lesbian writers, including Petra Kuppers, Batya Rossberg, Erin Russell, and more.
Exacting Clam | 2023
This issue features “extraordinarily varied writing relating to disability and chronic illness,” including excerpts from four books longlisted for the 2023 Barbellion Prize.
“You May Not Notice My Disability” by Elizabeth Kleinfeld
Open Secrets Magazine | 2024
This essay begins, “I once confronted a woman who had parked in a disabled parking spot at a store.”
“Starship Somatics: Disability Walking in Outer Space” by Petra Kuppers
The Hopkins Review | 2024
This essay begins, “Walking is strange to me. I experience it as something akin to being on a ship: unstable, rocking, faintly surprising.”
Wellspringwords | 2025
The poem “nomad by profession” begins, “squatting below the crack / where my window opens farthest and the ledge, i / watch the winged overlords that roam the sky…”
“Ambulatory Wheelchair User” by Rita Maria Martinez
West Trestle Review | 2022
This poem begins, “Thank you, Gabe, for wheeling my / rebellious body amidst travelers scurrying…”
“Couch Potato” by Olivia Muenz
New England Review | 2024
“Couch Potato” by Olivia Muenz is published in Issue 44.2 of New England Review.
Sinister Wisdom | 1990
This issue “contains work from and about womyn whose lives are seriously disrupted by long-term conditions,” including Pat Parker, Barbara Ruth, and Amy Edgington.
Three Poems by heidi andrea restrepo rhodes
The Georgia Review | 2024
The poem “Crip time-loop pantoum” begins, “Relapse is familiar as ink at my distal phalanx / in the daily drama of the body. / Viral loads spilling out over the edges of me / in pain’s ineffable sanctions & complaint.”
Three Poems by Alex J. Robinson
Dipity Literary Magazine | 2023
The poem “Nocturne 1911” begins, “At the Premier Grand Prix de Rome, you played the piano / and fell from exhaustion. But next year you lived and / won.”
“Preventative Measures, 1949” by Jess Silfa
beestung | 2023
This poem begins, “It takes me a moment to realize that the doctor thinks dolor is pronounced like dollar, piece together that his thick mouth isn’t asking me for / money but assuring me I will feel no pain.”
“Chair/Body/Home” by Hannah Soyer
The Sun | 2023
This essay begins, “One of the first things I remember is being carried on my mom’s hip from our house to our neighbors’, where their high-school-aged son was playing music too loud.”
Words Without Borders | 2025
This collection—presenting fiction and essays about disability by disabled writers and translated by disabled translators—features writing by Clare Richards; Paige Aniyah Morris; Lim Sol-A, translated from the Korean by Clare Richards; and more.
“They write you feral” by A. A. Vincent
West Trestle Review | 2021
This poem begins, “how do i tell them i have survived / deeper gardens under snow & rain / how does rain fall upwards…”
Dipity Literary Magazine | 2025
The poem “i met gregor samsa at a college formal,” begins, “some human-sized beetle they found in prague, / in madison, he scuttles on the dance floor / six limbs, unnerving to his parents and sister…”
Lucky Jefferson | 2024
This digital issue celebrating eight autistic BIPOC writers features writing by J. D. Harlock, Shel Moring, Greta McGee, and more.
Writing Ourselves / Mad and Writing Ourselves / Mad Part 2
ANMLY | 2021
According to editor [sarah] Cavar, the poetry, fiction, photography, and artwork in this two-part folio celebrates “Mad creation, craft, and methodology” and “offers a third, collaborative option, in which we can bring our whole, multiple, unrecovered and anti-recovery selves to the table to tell the stories only we know how to tell.”
Fiction
Stolen Mountain by I. M. Aiken
Catalyst Press | 2015
ISBN: 9781963511284
In this novel, “EMS Captain turned sleuth Brighid Doran suspects that all is not what it appears on the surface at The Branston Club—a swanky ski lodge being built in her rural Vermont town.”
Angel Eye by Madeleine Nakamura
Red Hen Press | 2025
ISBN: 9781939096210
In this sequel to Nakamura’s Cursebreakers novel, “the city’s inquisitors and witchfinders are losing control, the magicians are growing more and more resentful, and the scars from Adrien’s last brush with disaster refuse to fade.”
The Book of Losman by K. E. Semmel
Santa Fe Writers Project | 2024
ISBN: 9781951631376
The titular character of this novel “learns of a new drug designed to locate the root of his Tourette through childhood memories,” is “lured by promises of a cure and visits the mysterious lab that developed the drug.”
The Australian by Emma Smith-Stevens
Dzanc Books | 2025
ISBN: 9781938603297
The paperback edition of this 2017 novel “follows the exploits and evolution of a young man—known only as ‘the Australian’—over the course of a dozen years, from his time posing for tourist photos as Superman to his life in New York, chasing fame and fortune.”
The Dragonfly Gambit by A. D. Sui
Neon Hemlock | 2024
ISBN: 978-1-952086-79-3
In this Nebula Award–winning novella, Inez Kato “lies, cheats, and seduces her way to the very top, to destroy the fleet that she was once a part of, even at the cost of her own life.”
Unfinished Acts of Wild Creation by Sarah Yahm
Dzanc Books | 2025
ISBN: 978-1-938603-28-0
“Following a tight-knit, eccentric Jewish family, the Rosenbergs, over four decades,” this novel “combines the madness of motherhood with the manic absurdity of grief.”
Poetry
Black Under by Ashanti Anderson
Black Lawrence Press | 2021
ISBN: 978-1-62557-018-5
This poetry chapbook “layers outward perception with internal truth to offer an almost-telescopic examination of the redundancies—and incongruences—of marginalization and hypervisibility.”
Trio House Press | 2025
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.”
My Love is Water by Rob Macaisa Colgate
Ugly Duckling Presse | 2025
ISBN: 978-1-946604-34-7
In this hybrid drama and poetry collection, Colgate “writes in rigorous and experimental verse to upend our understandings of desire, race, disability, and care.”
Haymarket Books | 2024
ISBN: 9798888900895
Dobbs’ poetry collection “explores surveillance, queerness, disability, race, and working-class identity in post-9/11 America.”
Phantompains by Therese Estacion
Book*hug Press | 2021
ISBN: 9781771666862
This poetry collection, which takes inspiration from Filipino horror and folktales, “is a visceral, imaginative collection exploring disability, grief and life by interweaving stark memories with dreamlike surrealism.”
The Word Works | 2018
ISBN: 9781944585259
According to Tyehimba Jess, this poetry collection is “a homegoing of homegirl reminiscence, a family reunion in verse and sound that sings a personal and public history alive and into our hands.”
Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky
Graywolf Press | 2019
ISBN: 9781555978310
A finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry and the National Book Critics Circle Award, Kaminsky’s “astonishing parable in poems asks us, What is silence?”
Close Escapes by Stephen Kuusisto
Copper Canyon Press | 2025
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.”
Fire in the Waiting Room by Liv Mammone
Game Over Books | 2025
ISBN: 9798989940097
According to Desireé Dallagiacomo, these poems “are a precise guide through belonging, grief, and above all: a deep and withstanding love for disabled and discarded bodies.”
D A N G E R O U S B O D I E S / A N G E R O D E S by stevie redwood
Sundress Publications | 2024
ISBN: 978-1951979638
redwood’s collection asks, “Can we find and reach and move and be in conversation with / be moved by people who also aim to destroy the worlds that aim to destroy us?”
Alice James Books | 2025
ISBN: 9781949944730
According to Edward Hirsch, this debut poetry collection “dramatizes what it’s like to stand on the outside looking in, to be in a relationship with someone who is incarcerated, to live within a love confined by the state.”
Saint Consequence by Michael M. Weinstein
Alice James Books | 2025
ISBN: 9781949944747
According to Katie Peterson, Weinstein’s collection is “a book of 21st century transits—out of an iconic American childhood, towards the culture and language of Russia, out of one gender and into another.”
Cyborg Detective by Jillian Weise
BOA Editions | 2019
ISBN: 9781942683858
Weise’s third collection of poetry “holds a magnifying glass to the marginalization and fetishization of disabled people while claiming space and pride for the people who already use technology and cybernetic implants every day.”
Clock Star Rose Spine by Fran Wilde
Lanternfish Press | 2021
ISBN: 978-1-941360-57-6
This collection of poems “explores family histories, feminism, visual art, disability, mythology, and of course the sea.”
Nonfiction
Head Above Water: Reflections on Illness by Shahd Alshammari
Feminist Press | 2023
ISBN: 9781952177071
This hybrid memoir “revisits personal journals to slowly piece together a narrative of chronic illness—a moving account of survival, memory, loss, and hope.”
Cataloguing Pain by Allison Blevins
YesYes Books | 2023
ISBN: 9781936919925
In this memoir, Blevins “explores motherhood, sexuality, and queerness as it juxtaposes the author’s diagnosis of MS with her partner’s gender transition.”
The Braille Encyclopedia: Brief Essays on Altered Sight by Naomi Cohn
Rose Metal Press | 2024
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.”
Trio House Press | 2025
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.”
A Perfect Turmoil: Walter E. Fernald and the Struggle to Care for America’s Disabled by Alex Green
Bellevue Literary Press | 2025
ISBN: 978-1954276420
This book recounts “the rise, fall, and redemption of the doctor behind America’s first public school for mentally disabled people.”
Voice of the Fish by Lars Horn
Graywolf Press | 2022
ISBN: 9781644450895
This interwoven essay collection “explores the trans experience through themes of water, fish, and mythology, set against the backdrop of travels in Russia and a debilitating back injury that left Horn temporarily unable to speak.”
Sundress Publications | 2025
This craft chapbook “interrogates privilege within the creative writing classroom, making space for disability, chronic illness, and neurodivergence.”
Bellevue Literary Press | 2020
ISBN: 9781942658689
In this extended lyric essay, Olstein “mines her lifelong experience with migraine to deliver a marvelously idiosyncratic cultural history of pain—how we experience, express, treat, and mistreat it.”
Autistic Adults: Exploring the Forgotten End of the Spectrum by Daniel Smeenk
Ronsdale Press | 2023
ISBN: 978-1-55380-695-0
In this book, Smeenk discusses “how autistic adults present and how they see themselves and offers insights on autistic adults, from an autistic writer.”
For When the Shapes Keep Changing by Hannah Soyer
Neon Hemlock | 2021
ISBN: 9781952086366
According to Rebekah Taussig, in her prose chapbook Soyer “generously invites readers into the experience of reliance and care over a lifetime and during a global pandemic.”
Your Hearts, Your Scars by Adina Talve-Goodman
Bellevue Literary Press | 2023
ISBN: 9781954276055
In this essay collection, published posthumously, Talve-Goodman “tells the story of her chronic illness and her youthful search for love and meaning, never forgetting that her adult life is tied to the loss of another person—the donor of her transplanted heart.”
