Poet, Scholar, and Project Curator, B. A., English and American Literature at Brandeis University; M. A. Playwriting at Columbia University

Kenny Fries is the author of In the Province of the Gods, which received the Creative Capital literature award; The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin’s Theory, winner of the Outstanding Book Award from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights; and Body, Remember: A Memoir. He edited Staring Back: The Disability Experience from the Inside Out and was commissioned by Houston Grand Opera to write the libretto for The Memory Stone. His books of poems include In the Gardens of Japan, Desert Walking, and Anesthesia.

Kenny’s work has appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, Granta, The Believer, Kyoto Journal, LiteraryHub, Electric Literature, The Progressive, Catapult, Los Angeles Review of Books, and in many other publications and anthologies. He wrote the Disability Beat column for How We Get To Next, and developed the Fries Test for disability representation in our culture. His work has been translated into Spanish, German, French, and Japanese.

Kenny is recipient of a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Arts and Literary Arts Fellowship, and was a Creative Arts Fellow of the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission and the National Endowment for the Arts. He has twice been a Fulbright Scholar (Japan and Germany), and has received grants from the DAAD (German Academic Exchange), Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, and Toronto Arts Council. He was an honoree on Diversability’s inaugural Disability Impact List and a DAICOR Fellow in transatlantic diverse and inclusive public remembrance, a program of Cultural Vistas and the Heinrich Böll Foundation. He is the recipient of a 2022 Disability Futures Fellowship from the Ford Foundation, Mellon Foundation, and USA Artists.

His work-in-progress is Stumbling over History: Disability and the Holocaust, excerpts which are featured in his video series What Happened Here in the Summer of 1940? He is also currently co-curating “Queering the Crip, Cripping the Queer,” which will be the first international exhibition on queer/disability history and culture, opening at the Schwules Museum Berlin on September 1, 2022. For 27 years, Kenny taught in the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Goddard College, and he has also taught at Fordham University and OCAD U.

Project Contributor, MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Minnesota

torrin a. greathouse is a transgender cripple-punk poet and essayist. Her work is published in POETRY, Ploughshares, and The Kenyon Review. She is a 2021 NEA Literature Fellow. Their debut collection, Wound from the Mouth of a Wound  (Milkweed Editions, 2020), was the winner of the 2022 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. She teaches at the Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University.

Project Contributor

John Lee Clark is a DeafBlind poet, essayist, historian, translator, and an actor in the most thrilling development in DeafBlind history, the Protactile movement. He is a 2021-2023 Bush Leadership Fellow, a core member of Protactile Language Interpreting National Education Center, and a research consultant with the Reciprocity Lab at the University of Chicago.

He is a recipient of a Disability Futures Fellowship from the Ford Foundation, Mellon Foundation, and USA Artists, and the recipient of a National Magazine Award for his essay “Tactile Art” as well as the Frederick Bock Prize from Poetry magazine. His book of poems How to Communicate, long listed for the National Book Award, and Touch the Future: A Manifesto in Essays, were both published by W.W. Norton.

Project Contributor, Ph.D., Department of English and Comp. Literature, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill

Lamar Wilson’s cross-genre work centers the voices and experiences of black, brown, and indigenous folk thriving in the rural South despite white nationalist terror. He is the author of Sacrilegion—the 2012 selection for the Carolina Wren Press Poetry Series, an Independent Publishers Group bronze medalist, and a Thom Gunn Award finalist—and co-author of Prime: Poetry and Conversation (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2014), with Darrel Alejandro Hoynes, Saeed Jones, Rickey Laurentiis, and Phillip B. Williams. Wilson is on the faculty at Florida State University, and has received fellowships from, among others, the Cave Canem, Ragdale, and Hurston-Wright foundations. He holds an MFA from Virginia Tech and a doctorate in African American and multiethnic American poetics from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

Project Contributor, Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing, University of Utah

Meg Day is the author of Last Psalm at Sea Level (Barrow Street, 2014), winner of the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize and The Publishing Triangle’s 2015 Audre Lorde Award, and a finalist for the 2016 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Day’s poems appear or are forthcoming in Best American Poetry 2020, The New York Times, POETRY, Prairie Schooner, AGNI, Beloit Poetry Journal, among other journals. Day holds a B.A. from the University of California, San Diego, an M.F.A. from Mills College, and a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing with an emphasis on Disability Poetics from the University of Utah. Day was also the 2015-2016 recipient of the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship and a 2013 recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry. Day has also received awards and fellowships from the Association of Writers & Writing Programs, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, The Amy Clampitt Fund, Lambda Literary Foundation, Hedgebrook, Squaw Valley Writers, the Taft-Nicholson Center for Environmental Humanities, and the International Queer Arts Festival. Day is Assistant Professor of English & Creative Writing in the MFA Program at North Carolina State University.

Day holds a B.A. from the University of California, San Diego, an M.F.A. from Mills College, and a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing with an emphasis on Disability Poetics from the University of Utah where Day was a Steffensen-Cannon Fellow, a United States Point Foundation Scholar, and Poetry Editor for Quarterly West.

Project Contributor

Naomi Ortiz is a poet, writer, and visual artist whose intersectional work focuses on self-care for activists, climate action, disability justice, and relationship with place. They are a highly acclaimed speaker and facilitator with a leadership style emphasizing inclusion and spiritual growth. Ortiz is the author of Sustaining Spirit: Self-Care for Social Justice (Reclamation Press) and Rituals for Climate Change: A Crip Struggle for Ecojustice (punctum books). Ortiz received the Disability Futures Fellowship from the Ford Foundation, Mellon Foundation, and USA Artists.

Project Contributor, Ph.D. in English at the University of Pennsylvania

Travis Chi Wing Lau is a poet who writes often about embodiment at the intersections of queerness and disability. His most recent chapbook, Paring, is available through Finishing Line Press. He is Assistant Professor of English at Kenyon College. His scholarly work is primarily focused on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature and culture with research and teaching interests in literature and science, the history of medicine, and Disability Studies. Travis has contributed to numerous publications dedicated to accessible public scholarship like Synapsis, Public Books, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Lapham’s Quarterly. He also regularly reviews collections of poetry for literary and arts journals like Up the Staircase Quarterly and Tupelo Quarterly. He has B.A. in English with a minor in Classical Civilization from the University of California, Los Angeles (2012). He received both his M.A. (2013) and Ph.D. (2018) in English at the University of Pennsylvania.

Project Contributor, BA Women’s and Gender Studies, DePaul University

Kay Ulanday Barrett aka @Brownroundboi is a poet, performer, and cultural strategist. Their second book, More Than Organs (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2020), received a 2021 Stonewall Honor Book Award by the American Library Association and was a 2021 Lambda Literary Award Finalist. They have received residencies from Tin House as a 2022 Next Book Winner as well as as a 2020 James Baldwin Fellow at MacDowell, and most recently in 2023, residencies at Baldwin for the Arts and Millay Arts awarded by Lambda Literary.  Barrett is a three-time Pushcart Prize Nominee and two-time Best of the Net Nominee. They have featured at The United Nations, The Lincoln Center, Symphony Space, Brooklyn Museum, Princeton, Harvard, Columbia University, Northwestern, The School of the Art Institute, and more. Their contributions are found in The New York Times, The Huffington Post, Poetry Magazine, them., Colorlines, Al Jazeera, NYLON, Vogue, The Rumpus, to name a few.  Find Barrett on social media @Brownroundboi.

Project Contributor, MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University

Cyree Jarelle Johnson (he/him) has had work published in The New York Times, Boston Review, WUSSY, The Wanderer, Vice, Rewire News, The Root, and Nat. Brut among other publications. He earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University with support from Davis Putter Scholarship Fund. SLINGSHOT, his first collection of poetry, won a 2020 Lambda Literary Award in Gay Poetry; development of this work was supported by Astraea Foundation’s Global Arts Fund, Culture/Strike Climate Change and Environmental Justice Fellowship, and the Rewire News Disabled Writers Fellowship. He is a recipient of a 2020 Ruth Lilly & Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from Poetry Foundation, and is the inaugural Brooklyn Public Library Poet-In-Residence. Find him on Twitter and Instagram at @cyreejarelle.