SEALEY CHALLENGE DISABLED/Deaf POETRY LIST (with caveats? plenty)
go!!!!
Sealey challenge for disabled/ Deaf poets, go!: (aka RETURN OF THE STACK)
the Sealey challenge is something I started seeing a year or so ago that happens every august, where the idea is that you read a book of poetry a day for all of august, I guess as a way of encouraging people to read poetry. I started seeing it around the other day and it being the day after disabled love and rage, oops, pride month was over, got the wheels of my brain thinking.
first of all, I think the challenge??? of reading 31 books in 31 days???? is inaccessible for a lot of people (which the sealey challenge website freely admits and says there’s no wrong way to do it, ok ok) , esp considering that a lot of people also read in audiobook for access and that a lot of poetry books aren’t in audiobook because poetry publishers don’t have money for it and big audiobook publishers don’t pick us up because they don’t think there’s profit in it. but also because brains, spoons, time, comprehension, exhaustion. as my friend stefani pointed out, maybe also it’s better to take your time reading poetry so you can crip time slow savor it??? (it’s also weird to me in its August without any mention of Black August- why not April for poetry month? anyways….)
this is the other thing about disability and the Sealey Challenge: disabled, Deaf, DeafBlind, sick and neurodivergent poetry at multiple margins, it isn’t just books! it’s chapbooks, websites, tumblr/ ig poetry, music/ sound/ noises/ nonspoken language, ProTactile performance, haptics, live performance that happens once and you miss it, ASL poetry, stuff written on the wall., shit yelled on the subway and the street, stuff written on the ward and the lockup cell, posters and stickers,writing literally written in shit and a finger on a wall stuff that is destroyed, burned. shit that hasn’t been invented yet, shit i don’t know about or may ever know!
some of us have Books, on publishers (some big, many many mostly small/ indie/ very small) and, many fine disabled/Deaf poets are self published, books but also in zines, blogs, tumblr, youtube reels badly or well shot, social media in gen, graffiti. are spoken word artists slam or performance poets, or perform in ASL or other signed languages, not text. if mainstream or literary publishers won’t publish us or refuse to understand or make room for how we write, we bust right out of it. not without cost but also sometimes with infinite pleasure, intervention, challenge, quirked brow.
and then of course there’s the infinite question: who counts as disabled? are they REALLY disabled? do we go back and count those who clearly were but eschewed using The Word, for every reason? how do we feel about how they wrote disability if they didn’t use the word, because all the Using the D Word poets were white and/or racist, or shame, or narrow slice definition of disability then, or whatever? and, then there are differences between people who understand our work to be part of a disability tradition(s) and / or communit(ies) and those who write disabled experience but don’t know or relate to ideas of disabled or Deaf cultures…. and a whole lot in between…. and there’s a lot of different things that pop off in the continuum of it all.
this list is incomplete, imperfect, a work of “finding each other in the unseen” ( to quote stacey park milbern). writing it mean hyperfocus clawing through websites that were taken down, old one-off readings that are unforgettable yet forgotten by some, presses that went bust and schools and classes that closed down. it includes poets I love and have learned from, poets who I think are important to remember but whose poetry is not necessarily my cup of tea, poets I haven’ read yet but found and and listed during furious searching, and one or two poets i have personal or political differences with but who i would be remiss if I left them out of this beginning attempt at a loud raucous un-canon. I definitely forgot people and I gave up on hyperlinking everything because I just ran out of steam.
disabled poetry? isn’t that so 2022? or is it? damn 2022 simultaneously feels like last week, a million eras ago, and like a high water mark of disabled poetics which also feels so weird. early lockdown/ public emergency covid made people guiltily pay attention for a hot second, for a hot second there was money and special issues. now, not so much. you’ll notice there is not a recommended list of disabled poets on the Sealey page and that many Big Poetry places still don’t have disabled as a search term. I did a disabled poets folio for poets.org in 2022 and asked them to make disability a keyword for their overall database; 4 years later, no dice. yet here we still are, surviving after the deaths of cultural leader-organizers like Patty Berne and Alice Wong. writing because we can’t not.
cultural work was one of the first places I met disability justice. us telling our true stories, not palatable or neat and pretty or lull you to sleep stories, is still one of our greatest weapons. if they take or try to take so many things away- from medicaid and EBT slash and burn cuts to Olmstead and the ADA to, yes, a time of greater visibility and access to literary spaces including those that pay money - we might as well write our asses off and refuse to lie. write in the traditions of those who came before us and made us, and those side by side, with all our guts and don’t give a fuck. all our really, really give a fuck.
having said all of this and that, here is my eclectic and incomplete and contradictory list.
happy 3 days after disabled love and rage month. every month is disabled love and rage month.
here goes: the list
Audre Lorde, all works
Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands (and other poetry in other books)
tatiana de la tierra
June Jordan
Chrystos
Laura Hershey: On the Life and Work of an American Master (edited by Meg Day and Nikki Herd) or look on her website
All the Names Spoken, Raymond Antrobus
Ntozake Shange, many volumes including nappy edges, the love space demands, Sing A Black Girl’s Song
echolalia echolalia, Jane Shi
Sick, Jody Chan
Slingshot, Cyree Jarelle Johnson.
Watchnight, Cyree Jarelle Johnson
Kindling, Aurora Levins Morales
Silt, Aurora Levins Morales
Unfurl, Eli Clare
The Marrow’s Telling, Eli Clare
Disability folio, Mizna Magazine : https://mizna.org/mizna-online/disability-folio/
the variety of poetic/ interdisciplinary poetic audio description work found in Kinetic Light’s work
Lateef McLeod
Tala Khanmalek, https://www.talakhanmalek.com/writing.
TS Banks., Split
TS Banks Call Me Ill
NEVE
mel baggs, in my language
heidi andrea restrepo rhodes, Wayward Creatures, The Inheritance of Haunting
torrin greathouse, Wound from the Mouth of a Wound
Camisha L Jones, Flare and https://www.poetcamishajones.com/poetry.html
Naomi Ortiz, https://www.naomiortiz.com/poetry
Every Place on the Map Is Disabled: Poems and Essays, edited by Camisha Banks, Michael Northen, Naomi Ortiz and Travis Chi Wing Lau.
Ellen Samuels Hypermobilities and Your Body Should Be Part of This World.
Constance Merritt
Paula Gunn Allen
Aaron Ambrose, worn out gorgeous
Maria Palacios, Sins Invalid and https://cripstory.wordpress.com/
L. Lamar Wilson, Sacraligion
Elena Rose Vera
Root for the Underdog, Meliza Banales
Son of Byford, Juba Kalamka
noemi martinez, https://hermanaresistpress.gumroad.com
Travis Chi Wing Lau, What’s Left Is Tender
breaking poems, Suheir Hammad
Last Psalm at Sea Level, Meg Day and work in ASL: https://www.megday.com/all-ears
I Don’t Want to Be Understood , J. Jennifer Espinoza
Bless the Blood: A Cancer Memoir, Walela Nehanda
A Fate Worse Than Death, Nisha Patel
a body more tolerable, jaye simpson.
Johanna Hedva
More Than Organs, kay ulanday barrett.
Saleem Hue Penny ,
https://saleemhue.me/
JJJJJerome Ellis
https://www.jjjjjerome.com/
John Lee Clark
https://johnleeclark.com/
Stacey Park MIlbern, individual poems online/ in vimeo, can be found at this link: https://disabilityvisibilityproject.com/.../staceytaught.../
Stefani Echeverria Fenn, https://writing-freedom.org/.../stefani-echeverria-fenn/
william maria rain, Fix this Mess
https://anmly.org/
Deaf Poets Society
The Massachusetts Review Disability Justice issue vol LXIII 2022, guest editors Khairani Barokka and Cyree Jarelle Johnson
Joselia Rebecca Hughes
Leroy F. Moore Jr
Patty Berne- Patty is not always credited as or thought of as a poet or writer, but her poetic writing appears in multiple places in Sins Invalids work and beyond.
Raymond Luczak (many books)
Ashley Young https://www.deafpoetssociety.com/ashley-young
Ra Avis: Dinosaur-Hearted (Hostile 17 Print) and Flowers & Stars (Hostile 17 Print).
Rasha Abdulhadi
Kai Cheng Thom, A Map of No Homeland
Zefyr Lisowski
Tara Hardy
Moonyeka
Nic Masangkay
DuiJi Mshinda
May Tomorrow Be Awake: On Poetry, Autism and Our Neurodiverse Future
and me, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha: esp Bodymap, Tonguebreaker, The Way Disabled People Love Each Other
who would you add?
love in a weird and only time,
Leah
(ps: I have been busy and offline and there’s a whole backlog of posts coming. watch this space for more soon.)