SEALEY CHALLENGE DISABLED/Deaf POETRY LIST (with caveats? plenty)

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.

happy 3 days after disabled love and rage month. every month is disabled love and rage month.

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.)