Power of Narrative 2025

Disability memoir has a long history: life writing is one of the most powerful ways that disabled writers and activists have developed a vocabulary for understanding human experience beyond the "standard" or the "normal." But what does it mean to write a disability memoir, within all the cultural tropes that already exist about disability? What new insights can this form unearth? And when can disability memoir become hybrid, intersecting with other genres such as reporting and criticism? In this session, Rachel Kolb, author of the upcoming memoir Articulate: A Deaf Memoir of Voice, will interview Andrew Leland, author of The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight, for an engaging cross-disability conversation about these questions and more