July is Disability Pride Month, a special time to honor the diversity and uniqueness of each person in the disability community. In this conversation, authors Keah Brown and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha will discuss their work and experience as  writers with disabilities.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Keah Brown is a journalist, author, studying actress and screenwriter. She is the recipient of Ulta Beauty’s Muse 100 award, Which is a celebration of 100 inspirational voices around beauty, she is one of The Root’s 100 most influential African Americans of 2018. Keah is the creator of the viral hashtag, #DisabledAndCute. Her work has appeared in Town & Country Magazine, Teen Vogue, Elle, Harper’s Bazaar, Marie Claire UK, and The New York Times, among other publications. Her Debut essay collection, The Pretty One is out now.  Her debut picture book, Sam’s Super Seats will be out Fall 2022 via  Kokila books.

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is a queer disabled nonbinary femme writer, educator and disability/transformative justice worker of Burgher/Tamil Sri Lankan and Irish/Roma ascent.  They are the author or co-editor of nine books, including most recently, co-edited with Ejeris Dixon, Beyond Survival, Stories and Strategies from the Transformative Justice Movement, Tonguebreaker, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice,  Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home (ALA Above the Rainbow List, short-listed for the Lambda and Publishing Triangle Awards), Bodymap (short-listed for the Publishing Triangle Award), Love Cake (Lambda Literary Award winner), andConsensual Genocide, with Ching-In Chen and Jai Dulani, she co-editedThe Revolution Starts At Home: Confronting Intimate Violence in Activist Communities. They are the 2020 recipient of the Lambda Foundation’s Jeanne Cørdova Prize in Lesbian/Queer Nonfiction, recognizing “a lifetime of work documenting the complexity of queer experience” and are also the recipient of the groundbreaking 2020 US Artists Disability Futures Fellowship.

GET THE BOOKS

• The Pretty One: On Life, Pop Culture, Disability, and Other Reasons to Fall in Love with Me by Keah Brown
• Care Work : Dreaming Disability Justice by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
• Disability Visibility : First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century edited by Alice Wong, including the essay Nurturing Black Disabled Joy  by Keah Brown

ACCESSIBILITY NOTES

If you find it hard to read standard print, The New York Public Library’s Andrew Heiskell Library provides free access to talking books, talking book players, braille, a talking book download website and a free talking book and e-braille app for mobile devices. Learn more and apply.

Note: DB = available on BARD in talking book format and as a mailable talking book. Some titles are available through Bookshare and can be found through the Bookshare (BK) link under that title. All Heiskell members can gain access to Bookshare for free. DB (digital talkingbook) / BK (Bookshare)

• American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation will be provided for this event.
• Real-time CART (Communication Access Real-Time Translation) captioning will be provided for this event.
• Please email branchprograms@nypl.org with any accessibility questions or requests.

This program will be streamed live on Zoom. You must register with your email address above in order to receive the link to participate.