Placing Disability: Personal Essays of Embodied Geography (Literary Disability Studies)

Placing Disability presents an international collection of personal essays that address the experience of disability in particular geographical locations. Each chapter engages the question of what it means to be disabled in a specific place, exploring issues of movement, work and play, community and activism, artistic production, love and marriage, access and social services, family and friendship, memory and aging—all informed by the places that people inhabit. The book is organized in terms of topographies and vistas, rather than being bound by the map, to emphasize the defining, constitutive effects of place. The authors included in Placing Disability hail from different countries, neighborhoods, climates, and landscapes; from various backgrounds and professions; from a range of disciplinary perspectives and strategies. They are trained as academics, literary critics, poets, students, public speakers, memoirists, educators, philosophers, administrators, and activists. Their essays refine our understanding of the complex dynamic between self and circumstance as they survey the impact of geographical region on their life experiences. This book is intended to be useful in creative-writing workshops, Disability Studies seminars, and classes on environmental literature, and to appeal to general readers of memoir as well as to scholars of contemporary body theory or the Anthropocene.

Susannah B. Mintz is Professor of English at Skidmore College. Her books include the memoir Love Affair in the Garden of Milton (2021) and four scholarly volumes on disability and literature. She is also the co-editor of four collections of work on disability issues, including Disability Experiences (2019, with G. Thomas Couser).

Gregory Fraser is Professor of English at the University of West Georgia. He is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Little Armageddon (2021), and co-author of two writing textbooks. Fraser’s poetry has appeared in journals including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Southern Review, and Ploughshares. He is the recipient of several awards, including grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation.