March 26 we attended this beautiful panel on Disability Intimacy: Essays on Love, Care, and Desire by Alice Wong with The Longmore Institute. Panelists featured in the anthology spoke about on disability & intimacy themes tied to romance, community, caregiving and friendships. The Panel featured Yomi Young, Khadijah Queen, Sejal Shah, and moderated by Alice Wong. We were very moved by this great talk.
“My thoughts on the disability intimacy panel are very positive. The title was accurate because this conversation was intimate, warm, and personal. Each one of the panelist and moderator brought such expansive views of what intimacy looks like for them. It brought tears to my eyes. The event felt accessible to me and I’d love to read the book when I get a chance.” shares Ry from Calling Up Justice
Panelists:
Yomi Young:
Young is an Oakland-based consultant, activist, and disability justice dreamer whose primary work centers on health equity. She devotes her time, talent, resources, and passion to the full social, political, and economic liberation of all disabled bodies.
Dr. Khadijah Queen:
Queen is the author of six books of innovative poetry and hybrid prose, most recently Anodyne (Tin House 2020), winner of the William Carlos Williams award from the Poetry Society of America. Individual works appear in American Poetry Review, The Yale Review, Ploughshares, Harper’s Magazine, The Poetry Review (UK) and widely elsewhere. A Cave Canem alumna, 2022 Disability Futures Fellow, and 2023 Civitella Ranieri Fellow, she holds a PhD in English form University of Denver. With K. Ibura, she co-edited Infinite Constellations (FC2 2023), a multi-genre anthology of speculative writing by authors from the global majority. Her book of literary theory and criticism, Radical Poetics, is forthcoming in 2025 from University of Michigan Press.
Sejal Shah:
Shah is a writer, interdisciplinary artist, and educator. Her debut story collection, How to Make Your Mother Cry: fictions, is forthcoming from West Virginia University Press in May 2024. Her essay collection, This Is One Way to Dance, was a university common read, an NPR Best Book of 2020, and named in over thirty most-anticipated or best-of lists including Lit Hub, the Los Angeles Times, and PEN America. She is also the author of the groundbreaking essay on invisible disability and neurodiversity, “Even If You Can’t See It.” She lives in Rochester, New York.