This Thursday, November 17, at 6pm, we are thrilled to have Rebekah Taussig, author of Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body, provide a virtual talk. Our partners at An Unlikely Story Bookstore will be hosting this talk, where Taussig will discuss her book as well as aspects of her life that influenced her writing and teaching career. The event can be accessed here. No registration is necessary, so please stop in virtually and enjoy the chat!
Rebekah Taussig will challenge everything you think you know about disability as she
invites us into her experience of living in a body that looks and moves differently than most.
“What would it mean for disabled folks if society saw us as acceptable, equal, valuable parts of
the whole?” she writes in her memoir, Sitting Pretty: The View From My Ordinary Resilient Disabled
Body (HarperOne).
Taussig, who has been paralyzed since the age of three, is a mom, wife, author, disability
advocate and educator with a Ph.D in creative nonfiction and disability studies. She is a
passionate teacher with a range of experience, from freshmen in high school to upper-level
college classes covering subjects from English literature, composition and creative writing to
disability studies.
She is also one hell of a fighter on a mission to show that disabled people have incredible
value; as she argues, a more inclusive world is a sturdier, kinder, more imaginative world for all of
us.
A storyteller at heart with a great sense of humor, Taussig invites us to think bigger and
more critically about who has a seat at the table and the barriers that bar others from inclusion.
She’s held talks and workshops at the University of Michigan, Davidson College and Yale
University on disability representation, identity and community, and her writing appears in
publications from TIME to Design*Sponge. She’s been a guest on a myriad of podcasts and also
runs the Instagram platform @sitting_pretty, where she crafts “mini-memoirs” for her more than
50,000 followers to contribute nuance to the collective narratives being told about disability in
our culture. Taussig is the recipient of the Hefner Heitz Kansas Book Award in Literary Nonfiction
for Sitting Pretty.
NEA Big Read is a program of the National Endowment for the Arts in partnership with Arts Midwest.
