Pride Month: Spotlight on Authors with Disabilities

Disability Pride Month: Spotlight on Authors with Disabilities

Ainsley Shaw • July 11, 2025

July is Disability Pride Month and commemorates the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Lioness Books is celebrating this month by featuring authors with disabilities, amplifying their voices, and highlighting literature that focuses on self-representation, reclamation, inclusion, and history.

Here are some authors with disabilities and literature to engage with this month and beyond:

Octavia E. Butler

Born in Pasadena, California in 1947, Octavia E. Butler remains a trailblazer in writing science fiction and one of the first female and African American writers in the genre. As stated by the National Women’s History Museum, Butler struggled in school as a child due to dyslexia and loved to read and make up stories. At age nine, she found her calling of writing science fiction, and today her stories and books containing themes of racial injustice, women’s rights, global warming, and political inequality are widely renowned. Butler’s eerie dystopian modern classic Parable of the Sower follows the life of a young girl in a post-apocalyptic world of disaster caused by climate change and economic crisis.

Purchase Parable of the Sower

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Woman with glasses resting chin on hand, in front of a bookshelf with books by Octavia Butler.

Joshua Trujillo/seattlepi.com, via Associated Press

Woman resting chin on hand, wearing glasses and patterned jacket, in front of a bookshelf.

Joshua Trujillo/seattlepi.com, via Associated Press

Octavia E. Butler

Purchase Parable of the Sower

Purchase Audiobook

Man with glasses looking upward, slight smile, outdoor setting.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/ilya-kaminsky, via Poetry Foundation

Ilya Kaminsky

At just four years old, Ilya Kaminsky lost most of his hearing due to a medical misdiagnosis in his hometown of Odessa, Ukraine. According to the Poetry Foundation, upon being granted political asylum by the United States in 1993 and his father’s death in 1994, he began to write poetry in English. He went on to gain two degrees, co-found Poets for Peace, and collect many accolades for his poems. His 2019 poetry collection Deaf Republic, tells the story of a country in political turmoil where all of the citizens become deaf and learn to use sign language due to the killing a deaf boy.

Purchase Deaf Republic

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Jean-Dominique Bauby

Jean-Dominique Bauby was born in France in 1952 and studied in Paris. He went on to become a journalist and the editor-in-chief of Elle magazine in Paris. In 1995, a stroke paralyzed Jean-Dominique Bauby and left him without the ability to speak or move, otherwise known as locked-in syndrome. A career journalist, Bauby was determined to continue to write and let everyone know that he would not let his new condition engulf him. As noted in Time magazine, he wrote a memoir titled Le Scaphandre et le Papillon using a system composed of blinking his left eye—his only motor skill left—and a special alphabet formed by his nurses. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is the English translation of Bauby’s memoir about his experiences living with locked-in syndrome and his devotion to not let it defeat him. It encompasses his joy, irony, and suffering all at once and sold out on its first release.

Purchase The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Purchase Audiobook

Man with dark hair smiling, wearing a jacket with a high collar.

DR, https://www.susannalea.com/sla-author/jean-dominique-bauby/

Jean-Dominique Bauby

Purchase The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Purchase Audiobook

Man in a blue shirt buttoning it up, smiling against a dark background.

Peter Nicholson

https://www.lowellhandler.com/about/

Lowell Handler

An educator, photographer, filmmaker, and author, Lowell Handler has lived many lives. His photos have appeared in a plethora of major magazines and newspapers and his personal documentary was nominated for an Emmy and won the San Francisco International Film Festival. Twitch and Shout is the title of both Lowell Handler’s personal documentary and memoir about his life and experiences with Tourette syndrome. As noted on his website, Handler’s memoir “is a heartfelt and often humorous effort to reclaim and humanize a disorder that can keep others at a distance.”

Purchase Twitch and Shout

An honorable mention is Uncanny magazine’s 24th issue, “Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction.” This issue contains short-fiction, poetry, and essays by numerous authors with overarching themes of reconfiguring the science fiction genre, dismantling and rejecting certain narratives, and making space for a variety of disabled voices, characters, and stories.

Find the manifesto here and the issue here.

Via Uncanny magazine

Find the manifesto here and the issue here.

Anthologies & Collections:

Via Penguin Random House

Anthologies & Collections:

Disability Visibility: First Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century

Edited by Alice Wong, this anthology of first-person writing from disabled authors, activists, artists, politicians, lawyers, and more brings perspectives and voices that often go without notice and are highly misrepresented and underrepresented, to light.

Purchase Disability Visibility

Purchase Audiobook

Disability Visibility: First Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century

Purchase Disability Visibility

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About Us: Essays from the Disability Series of the New York Times

This essay collection contains personal first-hand accounts from people living with disabilities. It is edited by Peter Catapano and Rosemarie Garland–Thomson, and the various authors aim to reclaim space riddled with misrepresentation and stereotypes by telling their own stories and experiences.

Purchase About Us

Purchase Audiobook

Via Bookshop.org

About Us: Essays from the Disability Series of the New York Times

Purchase About Us

Purchase Audiobook

Via Bookshop.org

What We Have Done: An Oral History of the Disability Rights Movement

In What We Have Done, Fred Pelka presents the history and voices of the Disability Rights Movement from 1950 to 1990 with the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act. It chronicles the ways in which disability has come to be viewed as a political issue and how people with disabilities have had to fight for equal representation and participation.

Purchase What We Have Done

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