Category: Books

Reading Club Discussion Guide for ‘There Plant Eyes’

February is Low Vision Awareness Month, and I’m honored that There Plant Eyes was chosen as one of 3 Reading Club books by the NNLM (Network of the National Library of Medicine). Here’s the announcement, and here’s TPE featured plus other vision resources. Below is the discussion guide I created for them. I hope it will be useful for other… Read more

Footnote on ‘Year of the Tiger’ by Alice Wong

Year of the tiger: An Activist’s Life (Vintage, 2022) by Alice Wong (editor of Disability Visibility) is funny and angry and silly and deadly sobering and so much more. It’s a collection of essays, interviews, and images on subjects ranging from accessible and inviting coffee experiences to the Chinese Lunar New Year, from media representations of disabled people to the… Read more

‘Ulysses’ and Joyce’s Blind Community * Excerpt from an Article by Dr. Cleo Hanaway-Oakley

“Ulysses at 100: Why Joyce was so Obsessed with the Perfect Blue Cover” is a delightful article at The Conversation by Dr Cleo Hanaway-Oakley. It’s not only a fun deep dive into the famous blue cover, but it’s also about Joyce’s interest in blindness and the blind community. It is in this context that There Plant Eyes is referenced!: Blindness… Read more

“Inspiration Porn Star” * Fiction First Published in ‘Artificial Divide’

“Inspiration Porn Star” is a raucously dark, debauched, and ill-tempered short story about a blind comedian published last year in Artificial Divide. This anthology, edited by Robert Kingett and Randy Lacey, was a first-of-its-kind own-voices collection of fiction by blind and visually-impaired writers. Several friends also have stories in there, including Alice Eakes, who makes some memorable appearances in There… Read more

“The Best Books on Blindness and the Brain” at Shepherd.com

The Best Books on Blindness and the Brain on Shepherd.com is a grateful nod to the authors that deepened the sciencey bits of There Plant Eyes! Oliver Sacks, John Locke, Lawrence Rosenblum, Jason Roberts, & @DavidEagleman—whose book Livewired came out after I’d finished TPE but surely would have been in there. Why I wrote this Blindness and the Brain list… Read more

TPE Book Celebration and Conversation with Steve Kuusisto and Elizabeth Bearden at NYU (In-Person & Online)

Co-sponsored by the Modern and Contemporary Colloquium and the Center for Disability Studies at NYU There Plant Eyes: A Personal and Cultural History of Blindness (Pantheon, 2021) is now out in paperback! To mark the occasion, author M. Leona Godin (NYU) will be joined by Stephen Kuusisto (Syracuse University) and Elisabeth Bearden (University of Wisconsin, Madison) to read from their… Read more