Divergent Writers: Disability, Illness, Neurodivergence, and Ableism in Creative Writing - Hardcover

by Christie Collins (Editor), Saul Lemerond (Editor)

Bringing together essays from neurodivergent and disabled writers, and writers with chronic illnesses, this collection explores the impact of these experiences and the struggle against such biases within the field of creative writing. Whilst neuro-divergent and disabled writers publish world-class poetry, prose, and drama that moves readers and wins awards, they face many difficulties accessing these achievements - difficulties which often go unnoticed, unmentioned, and underappreciated. Visibility, insight, alternative approaches, and thorough research are all needed to create more inclusive writing environments. This book confronts these issues head on, calling for diversity in the creative writing field, community, and industry, and more equitable spaces in adjacent arenas from academia to publishing.

Broken into four sections, this anthology focuses on creative writing programs, classrooms, the community, and its people, combining narrative, research and practical contributions to the field to offer a mix of practical strategies, personal and pedagogical interventions, critiques, and craft meditations that explore teaching, transformation, evolution, embodied craft, visibility, belonging, injustice, otherness, and views from the outside. With essays and excerpts written by authors and educators from across seven countries, who are each impacted by a wide range of disabilities, including ADHD, autism, blindness, dyslexia, dyspraxia, stroke aphasia, cerebral palsy, bipolar, fibromyalgia, and rheumatoid arthritis, this collection informs, deconstructs and re-imagines to reform and revolutionize normative structures within writing institutions and communities.

Author Biography

Christie Collins is Lecturer of English at Mississippi State University, USA. A neuro-divergent and chronically ill writer, she has been published in Stirring, Phantom Drift, and Kenyon Review Online among other periodicals. Her chapbook, Along the Diminishing Stretch of Memory, was published in 2014 and her collection of poems, The Art of Coming Undone, was published in 2023.

Saul Lemerond is Assistant Professor of English at Hanover College, USA. He is a dyslexic writer who lives in Madison, Indiana where he teaches American Literature and Creative Writing. His fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in Bourbon Penn, Gigantic Sequins, Moon City Review, The Journal of Creative Writing Studies, and elsewhere. He is author of Digital Voices (Bloomsbury, 2023).