8 Disabled & Chronically Ill Poets to Read for Disability Pride Month

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Laura Sackton is simply a lifelong reader, writer, and person of made up worlds. She lives successful agrarian Massachusetts with her saccharine pup, and unneurotic they are determined to find each bully swimming spread wrong an hour's drive. She runs a tiny cooky concern retired of her location kitchen, and spends the remainder of her clip speechmaking and penning astir queer books. You tin perceive each astir her favorites successful her newsletter, Books & Bakes.

View All posts by Laura Sackton

Laura Sackton is simply a lifelong reader, writer, and person of made up worlds. She lives successful agrarian Massachusetts with her saccharine pup, and unneurotic they are determined to find each bully swimming spread wrong an hour's drive. She runs a tiny cooky concern retired of her location kitchen, and spends the remainder of her clip speechmaking and penning astir queer books. You tin perceive each astir her favorites successful her newsletter, Books & Bakes.

View All posts by Laura Sackton

Laura Sackton is simply a lifelong reader, writer, and person of made up worlds. She lives successful agrarian Massachusetts with her saccharine pup, and unneurotic they are determined to find each bully swimming spread wrong an hour's drive. She runs a tiny cooky concern retired of her location kitchen, and spends the remainder of her clip speechmaking and penning astir queer books. You tin perceive each astir her favorites successful her newsletter, Books & Bakes.

View All posts by Laura Sackton

Laura Sackton is simply a lifelong reader, writer, and person of made up worlds. She lives successful agrarian Massachusetts with her saccharine pup, and unneurotic they are determined to find each bully swimming spread wrong an hour's drive. She runs a tiny cooky concern retired of her location kitchen, and spends the remainder of her clip speechmaking and penning astir queer books. You tin perceive each astir her favorites successful her newsletter, Books & Bakes.

View All posts by Laura Sackton

Laura Sackton is simply a lifelong reader, writer, and person of made up worlds. She lives successful agrarian Massachusetts with her saccharine pup, and unneurotic they are determined to find each bully swimming spread wrong an hour's drive. She runs a tiny cooky concern retired of her location kitchen, and spends the remainder of her clip speechmaking and penning astir queer books. You tin perceive each astir her favorites successful her newsletter, Books & Bakes.

View All posts by Laura Sackton

Laura Sackton is simply a lifelong reader, writer, and person of made up worlds. She lives successful agrarian Massachusetts with her saccharine pup, and unneurotic they are determined to find each bully swimming spread wrong an hour's drive. She runs a tiny cooky concern retired of her location kitchen, and spends the remainder of her clip speechmaking and penning astir queer books. You tin perceive each astir her favorites successful her newsletter, Books & Bakes.

View All posts by Laura Sackton

Laura Sackton is simply a lifelong reader, writer, and person of made up worlds. She lives successful agrarian Massachusetts with her saccharine pup, and unneurotic they are determined to find each bully swimming spread wrong an hour's drive. She runs a tiny cooky concern retired of her location kitchen, and spends the remainder of her clip speechmaking and penning astir queer books. You tin perceive each astir her favorites successful her newsletter, Books & Bakes.

View All posts by Laura Sackton

Laura Sackton is simply a lifelong reader, writer, and person of made up worlds. She lives successful agrarian Massachusetts with her saccharine pup, and unneurotic they are determined to find each bully swimming spread wrong an hour's drive. She runs a tiny cooky concern retired of her location kitchen, and spends the remainder of her clip speechmaking and penning astir queer books. You tin perceive each astir her favorites successful her newsletter, Books & Bakes.

View All posts by Laura Sackton

Laura Sackton is simply a lifelong reader, writer, and person of made up worlds. She lives successful agrarian Massachusetts with her saccharine pup, and unneurotic they are determined to find each bully swimming spread wrong an hour's drive. She runs a tiny cooky concern retired of her location kitchen, and spends the remainder of her clip speechmaking and penning astir queer books. You tin perceive each astir her favorites successful her newsletter, Books & Bakes.

View All posts by Laura Sackton

Laura Sackton is simply a lifelong reader, writer, and person of made up worlds. She lives successful agrarian Massachusetts with her saccharine pup, and unneurotic they are determined to find each bully swimming spread wrong an hour's drive. She runs a tiny cooky concern retired of her location kitchen, and spends the remainder of her clip speechmaking and penning astir queer books. You tin perceive each astir her favorites successful her newsletter, Books & Bakes.

View All posts by Laura Sackton

Laura Sackton is simply a lifelong reader, writer, and person of made up worlds. She lives successful agrarian Massachusetts with her saccharine pup, and unneurotic they are determined to find each bully swimming spread wrong an hour's drive. She runs a tiny cooky concern retired of her location kitchen, and spends the remainder of her clip speechmaking and penning astir queer books. You tin perceive each astir her favorites successful her newsletter, Books & Bakes.

View All posts by Laura Sackton

Laura Sackton is simply a lifelong reader, writer, and person of made up worlds. She lives successful agrarian Massachusetts with her saccharine pup, and unneurotic they are determined to find each bully swimming spread wrong an hour's drive. She runs a tiny cooky concern retired of her location kitchen, and spends the remainder of her clip speechmaking and penning astir queer books. You tin perceive each astir her favorites successful her newsletter, Books & Bakes.

View All posts by Laura Sackton

Laura Sackton is simply a lifelong reader, writer, and person of made up worlds. She lives successful agrarian Massachusetts with her saccharine pup, and unneurotic they are determined to find each bully swimming spread wrong an hour's drive. She runs a tiny cooky concern retired of her location kitchen, and spends the remainder of her clip speechmaking and penning astir queer books. You tin perceive each astir her favorites successful her newsletter, Books & Bakes.

View All posts by Laura Sackton

July is Disability Pride Month, which means, similar the different 11 months of the year, it’s a large clip to delve into disablement lit! I person fallen successful emotion with the enactment of truthful galore disabled poets implicit the years, and I look guardant to discovering galore much during this period and beyond.

These 8 poets are conscionable a fewer of the many, galore disabled poets I love. Some of their enactment is astir disability, but it’s besides astir queerness, parenthood, nature, grief, work, relationships — successful different words, each the quality stuff. I’ve included poets with extended backlists arsenic good arsenic poets whose enactment has been anthologized oregon mostly appears online. There are truthful galore antithetic ways to read! Even if you’re not successful the temper for a full publication of poetry, these poets are inactive worthy checking out. Try speechmaking a poem connected your luncheon break, with your greeting coffee, oregon aloud to your spouse oregon roommate oregon person aft dinner.

If you’re excited astir disablement poesy and you’re looking for a broad instauration to disabled poets (both past and present), Beauty is simply a Verb is simply a fantastic anthology, and 1 I highly urge for poesy fans and newcomers alike.

cover of Bodymap by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s nonfiction books (Care Work and The Future is Disabled) volition ever beryllium my idiosyncratic favorites, but, happily for poesy fans, they are a prolific writer crossed galore genres! They’ve written respective poesy books, including Bodymap and Tonguebreaker, some of which are beautiful, visceral, susceptible collections astir disability, art-making, being a survivor, queer femme of colour kinship, and more.

cover of Wound from the Mouth of a Wound

torrin a. greathouse

I americium not a favorites person, but if forced to take my favourite poesy postulation I’ve work truthful acold this year, it would beryllium Wound from the Mouth of a Wound. This is simply a stunning debut, afloat of connection and imagery truthful deft and astonishing that I often recovered myself speechmaking lines implicit and implicit and over, conscionable to savor the beauteous daze of saying them retired loud. Greathouse writes astir her trans and disabled assemblage with singular attraction and precision and curiosity. There is truthful overmuch joyousness and messiness successful this collection.

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cover of Walking with Ghosts

Qwo-Li Driskill

Qwo-Li Driskill is simply a Cherokee Two-Spirit writer and scholar. They’ve edited respective anthologies of Indigenous and Two-Spirit literature, including the fantastic Sovereign Erotics. They are besides a writer whose enactment explores queerness, mixed-race and Indigenous identity, the legacies of ongoing assemblage violence, belonging, and histories of absorption and activism. In summation to respective chapbooks, I highly urge their postulation Walking With Ghosts.

A graphic of the screen  of The Perseverance by Raymond Antrobus

Raymond Antrobus

British Jamaican writer Raymond Antrobus has published 2 collections that volition unrecorded rent-free successful my caput forever: The Perseverance and All the Names Given. Both research themes of language, translation, Deafness and Deaf culture, parenthood, household legacies, history, immigration, and silence. Antrobus plays with signifier and connection successful ways that consciousness continually new. Reading his poems feels similar stepping into a caller world.

Cover of Knot Body by Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch

Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch

I don’t deliberation it’s a astonishment that truthful galore poets besides constitute different kinds of books — poesy takes truthful galore antithetic forms! Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch’s 2 books some defy genre categorization. Knot Body is simply a postulation of poems, letters, meditations, essays, and memories astir relationship and love, queer and trans joy, being sick, Arab identity, and a full batch more. The Good Arabs is simply a likewise fantastic genre explosion, blending the lines betwixt fabrication and nonfiction, poesy and prose.

cover of Swollening

Jason Purcell

Jason Purcell’s debut full-length postulation is simply a blend of playful and heartbreaking. It is mostly acrophobic with queerness and illness. Like galore of the poets connected this list, they constitute truthful beautifully and with specified tenderness astir bodies. I can’t hold to spot what they constitute next, and successful the meantime, I’m anxious to cheque retired their chapbook, A Place More Hospitable.

Cover of The Amputee's Guide to Sex

Jillian Weise

If you’re looking for a writer with a assemblage of enactment you tin truly excavation into, you cannot spell incorrect with Jillian Weise. Her debut collection, The Amputee’s Guide to Sex, explores the past of disablement and disablement representation, responding to and refuting the still-too-common depiction of disabled radical arsenic sexless and without desire. Her galore consequent books (including The Book of Goodbyes and Cyborg Detective) proceed to research these themes, grappling with cyborg identity, technology, ableism, enactment and desirability, relationships, and more.

Cover of Flare

Camisha L. Jones

Camisha L. Jones is the writer of the chapbook Flare, which draws from her experiences with proceeding nonaccomplishment and chronic pain. It explores the contradictions of surviving successful a body, the realities of ableism and stigma surrounding invisible disabilities, and more. Her enactment has besides appeared successful publications specified arsenic The Deaf Poets Society, and you tin work immoderate of her (gorgeous!) poems connected poets.org.


Looking for much superb disablement poetry? Check retired Kendra’s excellent database of disabled poets (I told you determination were truthful galore much than the ones connected this list). You’ll besides find immoderate poets connected this great database of 2SLGBTQ+ disabled authors.

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