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.
Winner of the 2026 Firecracker Award in Poetry
The Choreic Period: Poems by Latif Askia Ba
Milkweed Editions | 2025
ISBN: 978-1-639551-18-7
“The Choreic Period is a striking contribution to contemporary disability poetics, challenging ableist reading habits and expanding what poetic accessibility and difficulty can mean. We were moved by its pared-down nature, its illustration of the relationship between syntax and disability, and its innovative formal elements, including interruptive punctuation, staccato lineation, multilingual code-switching, and deliberate difficulty. Its force and voice made this conceptually sharp, powerfully embodied book a clear choice for the Firecracker Poetry Award.”
—from the judges
Poetry
Passager Books | 2023
ISBN: 978-1735514871
According to James Magruder, Bergman’s collection “combines the seemingly effortless plainsong of Whitman, Auden, and Marianne Boruch with the hard-won knowledge that Time erodes—and surprises—us all.”
Cataloguing Pain by Allison Blevins
YesYes Books | 2023
ISBN: 9781936919925
In this collection, Blevins “explores motherhood, sexuality, and queerness as it juxtaposes the author’s diagnosis of MS with her partner’s gender transition.”
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.”
The Dead Tree Garden by Lisa M. Dougherty
Nine Mile Books | 2025
ISBN: 979-8-9925462-3-1
The Dead Tree Garden “presents a profoundly evocative poetic landscape in which themes of memory, motherhood, and mortality are intricately interwoven.”
Nightboat Books | 2026
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.’”
Returns: Poems Selected and New by Kenny Fries
Nine Mile Books | 2026
ISBN: 979-8-9925462-4-8
“From considerations of Darwin and social Darwinism to the flinty and dismissive corridors of American medicine,” this collection “shows us how disability, embodiment, queerness, curiosity, and contrarianism can push us toward hope.”
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.”
Halfway from Home by Sarah Fawn Montgomery
Split/Lip Press | 2022
ISBN: 978-1-952897-25-2
In this book “blending lyric memoir with lamenting cultural critique,” Montgomery “grieves a vanishing world while offering—amidst emotional and environmental collapse—ways to discover hope, healing, and home.”
Wayward Creatures by heidi andrea restrepo rhodes
Host Publications | 2025
ISBN: 978-1-7376050-8-9
In this collection, “the colonizer’s language has been overgrown by an ecology of strangeness and possibility—poetry disrupts, rituals, and revolts, rendering queer abolition irresistible.”
The Importance of Being Feeble-Minded by Nathan Spoon
Nine Mile Books | 2025
ISBN: 979-8-9925462-2-4
Spoon’s poems “explore the themes of neurodivergence and the unique perspective of someone who experiences the world differently.”
Sounds I Cannot Hear Clearly Anymore Add Up to the Sum of Silence by Martin Willitts, Jr.
Bainbridge Island Press | 2026
ISBN: 978-1-961451-14-8
In these poems, Willitts “finds solace in sign language, in weaving and sheepherding, in the patient work of hands that speak when voices cannot.”
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.”
Dead Boys in Space by Sara Youngblood Gregory
YesYes Books | 2026
ISBN: 978-1-946303-13-4
This collection “uses poetry, speculative fiction, sci-fi, and crip queer politics to ask: what if a generation of gay men didn’t die of AIDS? What if their exile was actually escape?”
Nonfiction & Hybrid Works
Head Above Water: Reflections on Illness by Shahd Alshammari
Feminist Press | 2023
ISBN: 9781952177071
Head Above Water is “the intimate, philosophical memoir of Alshammari’s life of triumph and resistance, as a woman marked ‘ill’ by society and as a lifelong reader, student, and teacher.”
Etruscan Press | 2017
ISBN: 9780997745535
Dowd’s “fun, breezy, and discursive” collection of essays is “an intellectual game that exposes the artificiality of genres.”
Jelly, Baby: Essays on Disability and Vulnerability by Therese Estacion
Book*hug Press | 2026
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.”
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
Winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award, this book recounts “the rise, fall, and redemption of the doctor behind America’s first public school for mentally disabled people.”
Ill Feelings by Alice Hattrick
Feminist Press | 2022
ISBN: 9781558612303
This book about Hattrick and their mother “blends memoir, medical history, biography and literary nonfiction to uncover both of their case histories, and branches out into the records of ill health that women have written about in diaries and letters.”
All the Difference by Patricia Horvath
Etruscan Press | 2017
ISBN: 9780990322191
In this memoir, Horvath “details her experiences with bracing and spinal fusion, as she considers the literature of physical transformation and how folk and fairy tales shape our attitudes towards the disabled.”
CHABÓCHI DOLL by féi iká shumarí
Abode Press | 2026
ISBN: 979-8-9955832-0-2
According to Jzl Jmz, this essay collection “troubles the topography of womanhood through Trans Possibility & Undocumented archive making.”
Dreams in Which I’m Almost Human by Hannah Soyer
Red Hen Press | 2026
ISBN: 9781636284743
According to Rebekah Taussig, this memoir “weaves together the personal and the political, dreams and nightmares, flesh and machine, the mermaid tail and the surgical scalpel, to tell a story that wonders and wanders.”
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.”
Weaving Liberation by M. K. Thekkumkattil
Abode Press | 2025
ISBN: 979-8-9900598-8-7
According to heidi andrea restrepo rhodes, the essays in this hybrid chapbook “weave a fabric of our collective freedom dreams, passionately, tenderly, making of abolitionist protest a necessary form of love.”
Fiction
Captain Henry: 2½ Insurrections, 2 Wars, 1¼ Centuries by I. M. Aiken
Flare Books | 2026
ISBN: 9781963511703
According to Craig Higginson, Aiken’s novel is “a deeply humane, authentic and nuanced exploration of moral ambiguity and courage through the lenses of two very different wars and two very different lovers.”
Earth & Earth-like Planets by Devaki D. Devi
Abode Press | 2025
ISBN: 979-8-9900598-7-0
This chapbook of short fiction “hums with the steady pulse of Indian culture as diasporic youth create new worlds amid the weight of family expectations, shifting social norms, gender roles, and economic pressure.”
Red Hen Press | 2019
ISBN: 781597098977
According to Trebor Healey, in this novel Luczak has “not just paid homage to a favorite book, in this case Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood, but he’s also learned enough from it to rescue his protagonist from the echo of its fate.”
Anvil Press | 2026
ISBN: 978-1-77214-255-6
Capper is “a modern chronicle of a handicapped woman who chooses a life of criminality over poverty.”
You Make Yourself Another by Lucy Hannah Ryan
Half Mystic Press | 2023
ISBN: 978-1-948552-15-8
“Named for an insult hurled at Hamlet’s Ophelia,” this short fiction collection “blurs genre and gender lines to illuminate a state of sharp, queer flux.”
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.”
Literary Magazines
Oyster River Pages | 2024
The poem “Full Body Exercise” begins, “Do __y __ ou know the color of a word’s absence? / _I_ _ c _ ouldn’t tell you, anything about a word’s a-bsence…”
“People Should Not Repeat Things Back to You” by Sandra Alland
beestung | 2026
This story begins, “It bothers me when people repeat everything you say back to you. ‘I wonder if you’re buying things right now?’ I asked the person at the fancy used bookshop.”
ANMLY | 2025
According to editor Sarah Clark, this folio features “poetry by autistic writers that is socially-engaged, politically-charged, and geared toward raising our voices together against oppression and erasure.”
“How I See an Owl, Alive in the Face of Things” by Naomi Cohn
Short Reads | 2025
This essay begins, “On our walk to the coffee shop, my friend Ranae and I pass two young men. One is burly and dark, with a magnificent hipster beard and a camera as big as a lunch box; the other, slight and sandy, clutches binoculars.”
Lilith Publications | 2024
This online feature from Lilith features essays by Ashley P. Taylor, Mariah Guevin, Julia Watts Belser, and more.
Disability Pride Month Feature
Shō Poetry Journal | 2026
This feature showcases Apollo Chastain and sterling-elizabeth arcadia reading their poetry published in Issues 8 and 7 of Shō Poetry Journal.
Enduring Voices: Life with Disabilities, Invisible Illnesses, and Neurodivergence
IHRAM Literary Magazine | 2025
The writers and artists featured in this issue “capture the reality of living with various medical conditions and types of neurodivergence … with unflinching honesty and vulnerability.”
“Take Care/Warmly” by Kyla-Yến Huỳnh Giffin
beestung | 2026
This poem begins, “As the worst snowstorm in a decade encroaches, I pour canned chicken noodle soup into a pot on the stove and weep. I am sick, and I want my mother’s globby, bland mess of cháo.”
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.”
Five Poems by Colleen S. Harris
Philly Chapbook Review | 2026
The poem “Inflammation As Girl” begins, “Exposed to infection or injury, / the body’s mast cells release a rush / of histamine, of prostaglandins / that open the doors wide…”
Nerve to Write | 2026
The first issue of Nerve to Write—a new journal “for disabled, chronically ill, and neurodivergent writers”—features poetry, fiction, nonfiction, hybrid works, and visual art by john compton, Jacqueline Doyle, Rachel Drouillard, and more.
“Arriving in a New Place is Better Than Departing the Old” by Jemma Leech
Oyster River Pages | 2024
This poem begins, “The day I was born was the day I died for the first time. With no breath inside / Or out, I flatlined my way into the world. Beneath the surface of warm familiarity…”
“Golden” by Rita Maria Martinez
West Trestle Review | 2024
This poem begins, “Summer after neurostimulator surgery life / is golden. Imitrex injections expire unused. / The Doc praises, hugs me when I rattle a bottle / of painkillers full to the hilt…”
Philly Chapbook Review | 2025
The poem “Charlatan” begins, “Our bodies are products / in a world not made for them. / Isn’t that inspiring? Our bodies / made of snake oil, wet dreams, / magic beans, quicksilver.”
“Falling Ashes” by Shelonda Montgomery
Oyster River Pages | 2024
This story begins, “Badass Larry sit on the windowsill smoking a cigarette like he grown. Some boys way older than him stand beside him smoking too.”
Southeast Review | 2023
This story begins, “I have been gifted with misunderstandings. I said that once to my friend Blake, and he said, ‘I have been gifted with this son’s panties.’ This is the sort of thing I like about Blake.”
ALOCASIA | 2025
The poem “Queer, as in” begins, “the mountain sunrise seeping through the coyote fence at the foot of the snow wrapped & sparkling Jemez mountains// holding hands at Ghost Ranch…”
“Watching the Springtime Blooms Instead of the News” by Dihya Tamaghza
ALOCASIA | 2025
This poem begins, “An intoxicating fragrance of blue hyacinth / pulls a gentle blanket of tranquillity over / forlorn eyes. Warming spring sun lulls us / into a foolish haze.”
“Weave In, Weave Out: What a Web We Weave” by Pasquale Toscano
The Hopkins Review | 2026
This essay begins, “On an island of sheep and crags, she weaves a funeral shroud for the aged former king, chaos baying at the door.”
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 Solah, translated from the Korean by Clare Richards; and more.
“Can Disability Be a Blessing?” by Lauren Tuchman
Lilith Publications | 2024
This essay begins, “Sitting in synagogue, my heart directed towards prayer, when the d’var Torah (sermon) suddenly takes an ableist turn.”
“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…”
“No More Passing” by Lisa Zimmerman
ROOM: A Sketchbook for Analytic Action | 2024
This essay begins, “This is the essay my therapist doesn’t want me to write. I wish that I could say that I don’t understand her concerns, but I do.”
