Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories From The Twenty-First Century edited by Alice Wong

 

Disability Visibility, as the title states, is a collection of stories by a diverse range of disabled people. Topics range from Jeremy Wood’s narrative of being deaf while incarcerated to Britney Wilson’s account of her experience using New York City’s paratransit service Access-A-Ride. The book is divided into four sections: Being, Becoming, Doing, and Connecting, each containing many essays ranging from three pages to thirty. 

As a person who always tries to center diverse narratives in the books that they read I am ashamed to say that Disability Visibility is one of the few books I have read in recent years or perhaps ever that centers disability within its pages. As a nondisabled person, much of what I have learned of disabled people comes from TikTok or various other random sources. As a result, I found that when reading Disability Visibility I was often struck by how ignorant I was (and in many ways still am) of even basic knowledge of disability. What I mean to say is that I learned so much from this crucial and revolutionary work. 

Across each story I found the authors’ writing styles to be engaging and their short lengths helped me stay focused. It is clear that this collection is meant to be accessible for people to engage with rather than filled with complex, flowery, professional, or philosophical language that might dissuade the average person from reading the book. The relative simplicity of much of the writing does nothing to detract from the beauty and power of the narratives that it tells, in fact I would argue the clarity makes them even more hard hitting. 

All this is to say that I absolutely recommend Disability Visibility and I have no doubt that I will continue to return to many of its stories in the future.