On Display: Disability Pride Month
Welcome to our digital exhibit celebrating Disability Pride Month. This page is a companion to the physical display in the HKS Library, available through July 2025. Harvard affiliates can request books via HOLLIS, for pick-up at the library of your choice.
In this book display, you'll find literary nonfiction, novels, and memoirs about the identities and experiences of people with disabilities. You'll also find books on disability history, politics, and policy, primarily in the U.S.
Disability Pride Month is celebrated in July to coincide with the anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), signed into law by President George H.W. Bush on July 26, 1990. The ADA is a landmark U.S. law prohibiting discrimination against people with disabilities. In that same year, Boston held the first Disability Pride Day.
More on Disability Pride Month from AmeriDisability:
"This annual observance is used to promote visibility and mainstream awareness of the positive pride felt by people with disabilities. [...] [T]he first U.S.-based Disability Pride Parade was held in Chicago in 2004. Today, Disability Pride Parades are held in a number of places nationwide, such as Los Angeles, New York City, San Antonio, Madison and Brighton, among many others. These events celebrate 'disability culture' with the intention to positively influence the way people think about and/or define disability and to end the stigma of disability."
Harvard Library Research Guides
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Book Display: International Day of Persons with Disabilitiesby Alessandra Seiter
HKS Spotlight: Alex Green's "A Perfect Turmoil"
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A Perfect Turmoil: Walter E. Fernald and the Struggle to Care for America’s Disabled
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ISBN: 9781954276420Publication Date: 2025
Alex Green is an Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy at HKS, teaching op-ed writing and writing for politics and policy. He is a widely recognized advocate, writer, and scholar on the history of disability institutions in America, including as the author of landmark legislation to create a first-of-its-kind disability-led human rights commission to investigate the history of state institutions for disabled people in Massachusetts. He is also a Visiting Fellow at the Harvard Law School Project on Disability.
In 2025, Green published the book A Perfect Turmoil: Walter E. Fernald and the Struggle to Care for America's Disabled. In it, Green "recounts the life and career of Walter Fernand, a late-19th and early-20th century physician and educator whose work with people with disabilities left a complicated, and enduring, legacy." Read more in Harvard Law Today.
Harvard Initiatives
- University Disability Resources - Harvard-wide office that "serves as a central resource for students, faculty, staff, and visitors on disability-related information, procedures and services for our community" and "provides expertise in the development, implementation, and acquisition for best and promising disability-related University practices."
- UDR also provides resources to Harvard employees for securing workplace accommodations.
- HKS Student Disability Services (HarvardKey required).
- Digital Accessibility Services - Harvard-wide office that "supports the Harvard community in making sure that everyone has the opportunity to access the university’s knowledge, ideas, and resources."
- Planning Accessible In-Person Meetings and Events from University Disability Resources.
- Hosting Accessible Remote Meetings and Events from Harvard Digital Accessibility Services.
- Disability Law and Policy - HKS course taught by Michael Stein that explores "how States develop national level programming to include persons with disabilities across a variety of sectors including health, education, employment, community inclusion, and social welfare and development."
- Disability Justice Caucus - HKS student organization that "exists to encourage engagement by students and faculty with disability and ableism as critical areas of public policy, and to help make HKS a better place for students with disabilities."
- HKS faculty research related to disability.
Literary Nonfiction, Novels & Memoirs
Click on the circular "i" icons to view book descriptions. Click on the Harvard shield icons to access ebooks (Harvard Key required).
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Autobiography of a Face
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This powerful memoir is about the premium we put on beauty and on a woman's face in particular. It took Lucy Grealy twenty years of living with a distorted self-image and more than thirty reconstructive procedures before she could come to terms with her appearance after childhood cancer and surgery that left her jaw disfigured. As a young girl, she absorbed the searing pain of peer rejection and the paralyzing fear of never being loved.
ISBN: 9780395657805Publication Date: 1994 -
Barriers and Belonging: Personal Narratives of Disability
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What is the direct impact that disability studies has on the lives of disabled people today? The editors and contributors to this essential anthology, Barriers and Belonging, provide thirty-seven personal narratives that explore what it means to be disabled and why the field of disability studies matters. The editors frame the volume by introducing foundational themes of disability studies. They provide a context of how institutions--including the family, schools, government, and disability peer organizations--shape and transform ideas about disability. They explore how disability informs personal identity, interpersonal and community relationships, and political commitments. In addition, there are heartfelt reflections on living with mobility disabilities, blindness, deafness, pain, autism, psychological disabilities, and other issues. Other essays articulate activist and pride orientations toward disability, demonstrating the importance of reframing traditional narratives of sorrow and medicalization. The critical, self-reflective essays in Barriers and Belonging provide unique insights into the range and complexity of disability experience.
ISBN: 9781439913871Publication Date: 2017 -
The Cancer Journals
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Originally published in 1980, Audre Lorde's The Cancer Journals offers a profoundly feminist analysis of her experience with breast cancer & a modified radical mastectomy. Moving between journal entry, memoir, & exposition, Lorde fuses the personal & political & refuses the silencing & invisibility that she experienced both as a woman facing her own death & as a woman coping with the loss of her breast. After Lorde died of cancer in 1992, women from all over the U.S. & beyond paid tribute to her in essays & poems.
ISBN: 9781879960510Publication Date: 1997 -
Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice
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In their new, long-awaited collection of essays, Lambda Literary Award-winning writer and longtime disability justice activist and performance artist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha explores the politics and realities of disability justice, a movement that centres the lives and leadership of sick and disabled queer, trans, Black, and brown people, with knowledge and gifts for all. Leah writes passionately and personally about creating spaces by and for sick and disabled queer people of colour, and creative "collective access" -- access not as a chore but as a collective responsibility and pleasure -- in our communities and political movements. Bringing their survival skills and knowledge from years of cultural and activist work, Piepzna-Samarasinha explores everything from the economics of queer femme emotional labour, to suicide in queer and trans communities, to the nitty-gritty of touring as a sick and disabled queer artist of colour. Care Work is a mapping of access as radical love, a celebration of the work that sick and disabled queer/people of colour are doing to find each other and to build power and community, and a toolkit for everyone who wants to build radically resilient, sustainable communities of liberation where no one is left behind. Powerful and passionate, Care Work is a crucial and necessary call to arms.
ISBN: 9781551527383Publication Date: 2018 -
The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays
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An intimate, moving book written with the immediacy and directness of one who still struggles with the effects of mental and chronic illness, The Collected Schizophrenias cuts right to the core. Schizophrenia is not a single unifying diagnosis, and Esmé Weijun Wang writes not just to her fellow members of the "collected schizophrenias" but to those who wish to understand it as well. Opening with the journey toward her diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder, Wang discusses the medical community's own disagreement about labels and procedures for diagnosing those with mental illness, and then follows an arc that examines the manifestations of schizophrenia in her life. In essays that range from using fashion to present as high-functioning to the depths of a rare form of psychosis, and from the failures of the higher education system and the dangers of institutionalization to the complexity of compounding factors such as PTSD and Lyme disease, Wang's analytical eye, honed as a former lab researcher at Stanford, allows her to balance research with personal narrative. An essay collection of undeniable power, The Collected Schizophrenias dispels misconceptions and provides insight into a condition long misunderstood.
ISBN: 9781555978273Publication Date: 2019 -
Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century
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"Disability rights activist Alice Wong brings tough conversations to the forefront of society with this anthology. It sheds light on the experience of life as One in five people in the United States lives with a disability. Some disabilities are visible, others less apparent--but all are underrepresented in media and popular culture. Activist Alice Wong brings together this urgent, galvanizing collection of contemporary essays by disabled people, just in time for the thirtieth anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. From Harriet McBryde Johnson's account of her debate with Peter Singer over her own personhood to original pieces by authors like Keah Brown and Haben Girma; from blog posts, manifestos, and eulogies to Congressional testimonies, and beyond: this anthology gives a glimpse into the rich complexity of the disabled experience, highlighting the passions, talents, and everyday lives of this community. It invites readers to question their own understandings. It celebrates and documents disability culture in the now. It looks to the future and the past with hope and love.
ISBN: 9781984899422Publication Date: 2020 -
Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation
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First published in 1999, the groundbreaking Exile and Pride is essential to the history and future of disability politics. Eli Clare's revelatory writing about his experiences as a white disabled genderqueer activist/writer established him as one of the leading writers on the intersections of queerness and disability and permanently changed the landscape of disability politics and queer liberation. With a poet's devotion to truth and an activist's demand for justice, Clare deftly unspools the multiple histories from which our ever-evolving sense of self unfolds. His essays weave together memoir, history, and political thinking to explore meanings and experiences of home: home as place, community, bodies, identity, and activism. Here readers will find an intersectional framework for understanding how we actually live with the daily hydraulics of oppression, power, and resistance. At the root of Clare's exploration of environmental destruction and capitalism, sexuality and institutional violence, gender and the body politic, is a call for social justice movements that are truly accessible to everyone. With heart and hammer, Exile and Pride pries open a window onto a world where our whole selves, in all their complexity, can be realized, loved, and embraced.
ISBN: 9780822360162Publication Date: 2015 -
Fading Scars: My Queer Disability History
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Uncovering stories about disability history and life, O'Toole shares her firsthand account of some of the most dramatic events in Disability History, and gives voice to those too often yet left out. From the 504 Sit-in and the founding of the Center for Independent Living in Berkeley, to the Disability Forum at the International Woman's Conference in Beijing; through dancing, sports, queer disability organizing and being a disabled parent, O'Toole explores her own and the disability community's power and privilege with humor, insight and honest observations.
ISBN: 9780986183515Publication Date: 2015 -
Good Kings Bad Kings
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Bellwether Award winner Susan Nussbaum's powerful novel invites us into the lives of a group of typical teenagers--alienated, funny, yearning for autonomy--except that they live in an institution for juveniles with disabilities. This unfamiliar, isolated landscape is much the same as the world outside: friendships are forged, trust is built, love affairs are kindled, and rules are broken. But those who call it home have little or no control over their fate. Good Kings Bad Kings challenges our definitions of what it means to be disabled in a story told with remarkable authenticity and in voices that resound with humor and spirit.
ISBN: 9781616202637Publication Date: 2013 -
Life of the Mind Interrupted: Essays on Mental Health and Disability in Higher Education
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Academia isn't an easy place to be if you're brain isn't quite right. Colleagues carelessly call each other "schizo" and "bipolar." Another colleague is fired - easy enough to do these days, when most college teachers no longer have tenure - for "instability." In these ways and many more, psychiatrically disabled people working in higher education are reminded every day that their privilege, their very livelihoods, can be stripped away by the groundless suspicions of others.Their lives can be, in an instant, interrupted.Katie Rose Guest Pryal, JD, PhD, a former university professor, spent over a decade hiding her disability in academia. Although she worked as a disability studies scholar, she never discussed her own disability until after she'd left the academy. Only after leaving did she feel safe disclosing her own "broken brain." Since 2014, she has written widely in outlets such as Chronicle Vitae, Women in Higher Education, and more on the topic of mental health, disability, and academia, establishing herself as a voice of wisdom and and compassion. The often-personal essays in this book cover topics such as disclosure of disabilities, accommodations and accessibility, how to be a good abled friend to a disabled person, the trigger warnings debate, and more. Written for a popular audience, for those with disabilities and for those who want to learn more about living a disabled life, Life of the Mind Interrupted aims to make higher education, and the rest of our society, more humane.
ISBN: 9781947834064Publication Date: 2017 -
Mean Little Deaf Queer: A Memoir
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In 1959, the year Terry Galloway turned nine, the voices of everyone she loved began to disappear. No one yet knew that an experimental antibiotic given to her mother had wreaked havoc on her fetal nervous system, eventually causing her to go deaf. As a self-proclaimed "child freak," she acted out her fury with her boxy hearing aids and Coke-bottle glasses by faking her own drowning at a camp for crippled children. Ever since that first real-life performance, Galloway has used theater, whether onstage or off, to defy and transcend her reality. With disarming candor, she writes about her mental breakdowns, her queer identity, and living in a silent, quirky world populated by unforgettable characters. What could have been a bitter litany of complaint is instead an unexpectedly hilarious and affecting take on life.
ISBN: 9780807072905Publication Date: 2009 -
One More Theory about Happiness: A Memoir
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In the tradition of Lucy Grealy's Autobiography of a Face, One More Theory About Happiness is a bold and original memoir from the acclaimed, Whiting Award-winning poet Paul Guest, author of My Index of Horrifying Knowledge. A remarkable account of the accident that left him a quadriplegic, and his struggle to find independence, love, and a life on his own terms, One More Theory About Happiness has been praised by Charles Bock, author of Beautiful Children, as, "Smart and honest and clear eyed and above all, humane."
ISBN: 9780061685187Publication Date: 2011 -
The Speed of Dark
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Thoughtful, provocative, poignant, unforgettable, The Speed of Dark is a gripping journey into the mind of an autistic person as he struggles with profound questions of humanity and matters of the heart. In the near future, disease will be a condition of the past. Most genetic defects will be removed at birth; the remaining during infancy. Lou Arrendale, a high-functioning autistic adult, is a member of the lost generation, born at the wrong time to reap the rewards of medical science. He lives a low-key, independent life. But then he is offered a chance to try a brand-new experimental "cure" for his condition. With this treatment Lou would think and act and be just like everyone else. But if he was suddenly free of autism, would he still be himself? Would he still love the same classical music--with its complications and resolutions? Would he still see the same colors and patterns in the world--shades and hues that others cannot see? Most important, would he still love Marjory, a woman who may never be able to reciprocate his feelings? Now Lou must decide if he should submit to a surgery that might completely change the way he views the world . . . and the very essence of who he is.
ISBN: 9780345447548Publication Date: 2004
History, Politics & Policy
Click on the circular "i" icons to view book descriptions. Click on the Harvard shield icons to access ebooks (Harvard Key required).
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Disability in Practice: Attitudes, Policies, and Relationships
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Everyone is disabled in some respect, at least in the sense that others can do things that we cannot. But significant limitations on pursuing major life activities due to severely limited eyesight, hearing, mobility, cognitive functioning and so on pose special problems that fortunately have been recognized (to some extent) in our public policies. Public policy is important, as are the deliberative frameworks that we use to justify them, and the essays in thesecond and third sections of this volume have significant implications for public policy and offer new proposals for justifying frameworks. Underlying public policies and their assessment, however, arethe attitudes, good and bad, that we bring to them, and our attitudes as well deeply affect our interpersonal relationships. The essays here, especially in the first section, reveal how complex and problematic our attitudes towards persons with disabilities are when we are in relationships with them as care-givers, friends, family members, or briefly encountered strangers. Among the special highlights of this volume are its focus on moral attitudes and relationships involving disabilities,its emphasis on the importance of respect for persons as a necessary complement to generosity and charity, and the need to reconsider traditional deliberative frameworks for assessing policies.
ISBN: 9780198812876Publication Date: 2018 -
Disability, Gender and State Policy: Exploring Margins
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Foregrounding disability from an anthropological perspective, this book contributes to the studies in marginalization and social inequalities in India. Tracing global debates on the definition of disability, rehabilitation, and policies, it focuses on a South Asian model of disability. Covering a wide range of issues from international and national contexts, the book critically examines the role of disability rights movements, as well as the regional policies and practices. Disability, Gender & State Policy explores the cultural perceptions of disability, the construction of gender and personhood in rural and urban contexts, and the issues in social support and care work. It also highlights the implications of globalization and psycho-social disabilities among poor urban women. The book analyzes disabled persons' access to resources like education and employment opportunities in diverse sectors, providing a comprehensive account of the disabled, embedded in India's communities, citizenry, and democracy.
ISBN: 9788131605875Publication Date: 2013- -
Disability, Policy and Professional Practice
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This is the first book on working with disabled people to take an aspirational, outcomes-focused approach to professional practice. It forms the first attempt to grapple with the massive legislative and policy shifts in the disability field in the last 15 years and provides an up-to-date, positive approach to professional practice, based on the social model of disability. Disability, Policy and Professional Practice translates both adult and childrens' disability legislation and policy guidance into positive, creative, enabling practice methods for professionals in social care, health, employment and independent living.
ISBN: 9786613811882Publication Date: 2011 -
Disabling Interpretations: The Americans with Disabilities Act in Federal Court
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The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990 was intended to send a clear message to society that discrimination on the basis of disability is unacceptable. As with most civil rights laws, the courts were given primary responsibility for implementing disability rights policy.Mezey argues that the act has not fulfilled its potential primarily because of the judiciary's "disabling interpretations" in adjudicating ADA claims. In the decade of litigation following the enactment of the ADA, judicial interpretation of the law has largely constricted the parameters of disability rights and excluded large numbers of claimants from the reach of the law. The Supreme Court has not interpreted the act broadly, as was intended by Congress, and this method of decision making was for the most part mirrored by the courts below. The high court's rulings to expand state sovereign immunity and insulate states from liability in damage suits has also caused claimants to become enmeshed in litigation and has encouraged defendants to challenge other laws affecting disability rights. Despite the law's strong civil rights rhetoric, disability rights remain an imperfectly realized goal.
ISBN: 9780822958796Publication Date: 2005 -
Family Policy and Disability
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This book explores the status and scope of family policies related to households of children with disabilities, providing an in-depth, evidence-based review of legal, programmatic issues. It includes a discussion of the gaps between family needs and contemporary family policies in the United States and European countries, as demonstrated in these households' surveys. In addition, the volume offers a comparative analysis of cash benefits, tax credits and deductions, and in-kind provisions between the United States and select European countries (UK, France, and Sweden). Most importantly, this book identifies and continues the discussion regarding the critical role of family-centered policies, as expressed in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD), as well as the future of family policy toward families of children with disabilities at a time of economic crisis.
ISBN: 9781107049178Publication Date: 2015 -
The Boys in the Bunkhouse: Servitude and Salvation in the Heartland
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With this Dickensian tale from America's heartland, New York Times writer and columnist Dan Barry tells the harrowing yet uplifting story of the exploitation and abuse of a resilient group of men with intellectual disability, and the heroic efforts of those who helped them to find justice and reclaim their lives. In the tiny Iowa farm town of Atalissa, dozens of men, all with intellectual disability and all from Texas, lived in an old schoolhouse. Before dawn each morning, they were bussed to a nearby processing plant, where they eviscerated turkeys in return for food, lodging, and $65 a month. They lived in near servitude for more than thirty years, enduring increasing neglect, exploitation, and physical and emotional abuse--until state social workers, local journalists, and one tenacious labor lawyer helped these men achieve freedom. Drawing on exhaustive interviews, Dan Barry dives deeply into the lives of the men, recording their memories of suffering, loneliness and fleeting joy, as well as the undying hope they maintained despite their traumatic circumstances. Barry explores how a small Iowa town remained oblivious to the plight of these men, analyzes the many causes for such profound and chronic negligence, and lays out the impact of the men's dramatic court case, which has spurred advocates--including President Obama--to push for just pay and improved working conditions for people living with disabilities. A luminous work of social justice, told with compassion and compelling detail, The Boys in the Bunkhouse is more than just inspired storytelling. It is a clarion call for a vigilance that ensures inclusion and dignity for all.
ISBN: 9780062372130Publication Date: 2016 -
The Changing Disability Policy System: Active Citizenship and Disability in Europe
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Being an 'active citizen' involves exercising social rights and duties, enjoying choice and autonomy, and participating in political decision-making processes which are of importance for one's life. Amid the new challenges facing contemporary welfare states, debate over just how 'active' citizens can and ought to be has redoubled. Presenting research from the first major comparative and cross-national study of active citizenship and disability in Europe, this book analyses the consequences of ongoing changes in Europe - what opportunities do persons with disabilities have to exercise Active Citizenship? The Changing Disability Policy System: Active Citizenship and Disability in Europe Volume 1 approaches the conditions for Active Citizenship from a macro perspective in order to capture the impact of the overall disability policy system. This system takes diverse and changing forms in the nine European countries under study. Central to the analysis are issues of coherence and coordination between three subsystems of the disability policy system, and between levels of governance. This book identifies the implications and policy lessons of the findings for future disability policy in Europe and beyond. It will appeal to policymakers and policy officials, as well as to researchers and students of disability studies, comparative social policy, international disability law and qualitative research methods.
ISBN: 9781138652880Publication Date: 2017
