June 14, 2024

Alice Wong

Harvard Book Store welcomes ALICE WONG—bestselling author of Year of the Tiger and editor of Disability Visibility—for a discussion of her new book Disability Intimacy: Essays on Love, Care, and Desire. She will be joined in a panel discussion by LEAH LAKSHMI PIEPZNA-SAMARASINHA—author or co-editor of ten books, including The Future Is Disabled—and NICOLE LEE SCHROEDER—historian, educator, and disability rights activist. This event features an ASL interpreter and a live captioner.  

Details

What is intimacy? More than sex, more than romantic love, the pieces in this stunning and illuminating new anthology offer broader and more inclusive definitions of what it can mean to be intimate with another person. Explorations of caregiving, community, access, and friendship offer us alternative ways of thinking about the connections we form with others—a vital reimagining in an era when forced physical distance is at times a necessary norm.

But don't worry: there's still sex to consider—and the numerous ways sexual liberation intersects with disability justice. Plunge between these pages and you'll also find disabled sexual discovery, disabled love stories, and disabled joy. These twenty-five stunning original pieces—plus other modern classics on the subject, all carefully curated by acclaimed activist Alice Wong—include essays, photo essays, poetry, drama, and erotica: a full spectrum of the dreams, fantasies, and deeply personal realities of a wide range of beautiful bodies and minds. Disability Intimacy will free your thinking, invigorate your spirit, and delight your desires.

About Author(s)

Alice Wong is a disabled activist, media maker, and research consultant based in San Francisco, California. She is the author of a bestselling memoir, Year of the Tiger; the founder and director of the Disability Visibility Project—an online community dedicated to creating, sharing, and amplifying disability media and culture; and the editor of the anthology Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century and Disability Visibility: 17 First-Person Stories for Today (Adapted for Young Adults). Alice is also the host and coproducer of the Disability Visibility podcast and copartner in a number of collaborations such as #CripTheVote and Access Is Love. From 2013 to 2015, Alice served as a member of the National Council on Disability, an appointment by President Barack Obama.

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (they/she) is the author of The Future Is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes and Mourning Songs; Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice; Tonguebreaker, Dirty River and other books. They are a long time disability and transformative justice movement worker and a 2020 Disability Futures fellow.

Nicole Lee Schroeder is a historian, educator, and disability rights activist in higher education. She writes about disabled ingenuity, resistance, and survival past and present. In her spare time, she enjoys video games, fiber arts of all kinds, and iced coffee.