The Borg Collective published the second edition of a dictionary featuring disabled and deaf writers who also hold many additional identities. The Borg Collective published that edition with Including Disability. Queries on that edition? Contact Including Disability.
Pills and Jacksonvilles is out from Ecco Books. I’m a chronic pain patient.
Poetry by Sex Workers is a class I taught. More people should teach it.
I choose to be open about the pills I take and I choose to be in solidarity with people who practice harm reduction. I’d like to know why pharmacompanies got to advertise on screens across the 90s, 00s, and 10s, but now I’m supposed to be quiet? No. I wrote about that for WIRED. https://www.wired.com/story/cyborg-brain-mind-pandemic-philosophy/
Syllabus for the Liberation of Disabled People from Nondisabled People’s Books. I’m looking at you Peter Singer & JoJo Moyes & Anthony Doerr & Judith Newman & R. J. Palacio: Your fame is tethered to time. Your time has passed. —Cy. Weise
“Science Magazine said a couple weeks ago that The Egyptians revered disabilities. I told this to a woman I was on a panel with who has something called Dwarfism. The Egyptians buried Dwarfs like Kings. An African psychiatrist told me that, in some so-called African tribes, people with schizophrenia are considered prophets. I said well maybe Moses was one. You know, hearing voices. So you belong to a great tradition.” —Ishmael Reed, All Access Cafe, April 26, 2019. Link to video: https://youtu.be/lUWPx-c14g4?t=340
Literature by Disabled People
ENGL or LIT or CRW XXXX
Future Semester: You’re the Teacher
Your Email Address Goes Here
Class Days+Times Will Be Accessible to All
Course Objectives
Read & interpret prose & poetry by disabled people
Compose creative & critical responses
Collaborate through workshop
Apprentice with the work of one disabled writer
Course Description
Literature by disabled people begins, sustains and innovates nearly all literature. Homer, Sappho and Epictetus were disabled. So let’s start there. We will move through time – though time is tryborg fiction (e.g. crip time, sick time, quantum time) – and arrive at Patty Berne’s “Disability Justice” and Alice Wong’s Disability Visibility. Along the way we will ask:
— Who is a disabled writer?
— Why have disabled writers been hidden from us?
— Who benefits from the suppression of literature by disabled people?
— How do we reclaim disabled writers from non-disabled imaginaries?
In the second half of the course, apprentice with the work of one disabled writer you have never read before. Read your writer’s fragments, tweets, blogs, live journals, discord posts, notes from the caucus or the protest or the minutes of a meeting where your writer was present, scraps left behind by your writer in an archive you’ll probably have to find, open the cardboard box, open the external hard drive, open the email, g-chat, FB direct message, IG direct message, Snapchat, screenshot saved by someone who got your writers consent to preserve your writers everything, also interviews, book reviews, Tumblrs, TikTok videos, your writers’ comments on videos or posts by others: anything your disabled writer has written? Whether in a book or not? Read that. Turn in something. Anything you want. In convo with the disabled writer you selected to read. This is called an apprenticeship.
Required Reading
None of it is required if you don't consent to read it. Your consent comes first. The texts are impaired by having been in books only. There are many other kinds of writing by disabled people. Not everything is a book. But here are the books. Excerpted & available for free on Canvas. We will not read all of them. That would be impossible. We will probably only read from 4-6 of these books. We will purposefully slow-read because that goes against the nondisabled way and because I am disabled. Very disabled. If someone asks, “What does your teacher have?” Tell the person: “Audacity and pride. Those are her conditions.” The list below is in-progress and incomplete. A list of all the books by disabled people would be over 1000 pages of a syllabus.
Author Photo. Winter 2022/Spring 2023. I was harmed by cisgender men at my workplace where I am a professor. During that harm, I removed content from my site including images and I hesitated to delete my author photo. Instead I hastily created this image as record. Edit: I would now change from Latin to English in solidarity with transgender, agender, any gender people.
This is a larger conversation that I was having with grok. In January 2025, grok thought Borg Diem was a “fictional or futuristic dictionary.”