10 2SLGBTQ+ Disabled Authors to Read This Pride Month

Eli Claire is a genderqueer disabled author known for his work advocating for disability and trans rights. Perhaps his most well-known work, Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation, is now considered a contemporary classic of disability literature. He’s also a poet, and his collection The Marrow’s Telling: Words in Motion was a Lambda Literary Award finalist in 2008.

Bisexual Taiwanese American author Esmé Weijun Wang writes both fiction and nonfiction. Her essay collection The Collected Schizophrenias is, hands down, one of the best books discussing mental illness that I have ever read. Wang possesses an ability to convey the complex reality of living with a condition that society fears and often vilifies. She captures on page the struggle that many people with Schizophrenia face on a daily basis.

Jen Campbell is a former bookseller turned author who writes everything, from poetry to children’s picture books. Much of her writing centers ideas around disability and disfigurement. Over on her YouTube Channel, Campbell shares her experience with EEC Syndrome, which is a form of Ectodermal Dysplasia, and discusses disfigurement representation in the media. Her most recent book, The Sister Who Ate Her Brothers, features retellings of some of the world’s creepiest fairy tales.

A bisexual Two Spirit member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, Jen Deerinwater writes about disability and works as an activist for disability justice. Her writing has been included in Disability Visibility: First Person Stories from the Twenty First Century, Two-Spirits Belong Here, Crip Authorship, and Building Narrative Power for 21st Century Social Movements.

Kay Ulanday Barrett (aka @BrownRoundBoi) is a disabled Filipinx Amerikan transgender queer poet and performer. Their poetry collection, More Than Organs, is a ALA Stonewall Honor Books and a Lambda Literary finalist. Back in 2020, Alice Wong did an excellent Q&A with Barrett for Disability Visibility, a project that highlights disabled people and their work.

Proud bisexual Keah Brown, a writer and actress, might be most well-known for starting the #DisabledAndCute hashtag, encouraging other disabled people to share hot selfies of themselves. Her book, The Pretty One, follows Brown’s life as a Black woman living with cerebral palsy.