Disabled Performers Quotes

“I thought of Care Work as a community in your pocket when you have no crip friends or you are all alone, as so often we are. I have written or co-created nine books, but it wasn't until my fourth book that I started writing unapologetically about disability. It still felt like a risk. As a friend once said, "Everyone wants to write the poem that makes people go "yeah!" and pump their fist at the performance." So much of the time when I'd tried to write, or read poetry about being disabled, about being chronically ill, the opposite happened: instead of wild clapping and screaming, I got met with awkward silence, the nervous laughter, the "I'm not sure if it's OK to laugh," the #SadFace. If you wanted to be the best, to have people love your work, too often if felt like too much of a risk to write and perform crip work.

I was able to finally take that risk and write and perform and publish disabled poems in Bodymap, my third book of poetry, because of the collective work in disability justice writing and performance. Because of Sins Invalid and individual disabled BIPOC writers, because there was starting to be a movement of disabled writers and creators, queer and of color, who were creating space to do our work. I could believe there was an audience who was hungry for the work, and I got it. Without that, my writing would have stayed in my journal, stayed in the drafts that didn't make it into the books I published.”
― Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, The Future Is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes, and Mourning Songs