12 PUBLISHERS WEEKLY ■ APRIL 6, 2020
News
said Wong, who had
to learn the process of
working with a major
publishing house while
working with each of
the contributors to
meet deadlines. “As a
newbie, I learned a lot
of terms in the publish-
ing world, the process
of creating a book, and
the different roles and
responsibilities of all
people involved in
this project.”
Wong said the finished work
is “a glimpse into the complexity
and diversity of the disability
experience. Each piece I
selected is powerful, personal,
and political. I’m very careful to
describe this book as a small
sample of the current disability
experience that’s not meant to
represent all disabilities or give
a basic 101 about what it’s like
to live with a disability.”
While Heumann and Wong are reaching out to people
where they are, students come to study with Jaipreet Virdi,
an assistant professor at the University of Delaware. Virdi,
who is deaf, is a historian of medicine, technology, and dis-
ability. Part memoir, part historical monograph, Virdi’s Hear-
ing Happiness: Deafness Cures in History (Univ. of Chicago,
Sept.) breaks the mold for academic press publications.
“I had this moment when I returned after spending weeks
at the archives sorting through materials to find stories of
deaf people,” Virdi said, “where I came across a folder con-
taining my childhood medical records and results from the
hearing tests. That moment was quite emotional, because
it was the first time that I saw myself—and my story—as part
of this intertwined history of deafness. It occurred to me
that I couldn’t write this history without putting myself in
it as well. There was no way to tell this story about deafness
without revealing my own.”
The process of writing the book was difficult for the aca-
demically trained author, but Virdi settled on a story in which
her own experience guides readers through generations of
attempts to cure deafness, from ear trumpets to CRISPRgenetic editing technology—an idea whose premise of
“normal” and “defective” she dismantles. “About 20% of
Americans, roughly some 48 million people, have some
degree of hearing loss,” she said. “This persistent need to fix
and cure is part of the long history of stigma against deaf-
ness that oppresses individual freedom.”
In More Alike Than Different: My Life and Lessons for
Everyone (Prometheus, July), activist, writer, and athlete
David Egan describes a life forged in making the most of
personal freedom that people with the author’s disability
did not previously have. The book, the publisher claims, is
the first major published work
by an author with Down syn-
drome, and Egan, age 42, begins
by describing the outlook for
people like him when he was born
compared with the outlook
today. The differences in life
expectancy and autonomy are
stark, and poring over years of
speeches he has given as a dis-
ability rights advocate to write
the book with his mother, Kath-
leen Egan, Egan could see his own role in those advances,
whether as a competitive swimmer or a Joseph P. Kennedy
Fellow walking the halls of Congress.
“I belong to the first generation of people with Down
syndrome to break free from the institutions that robbed
us of our potential for productive lives,” Egan told a gath-
ering of Prometheus sales reps at a recent conference.
He can now look back on a lifetime of making the most of
his own potential—a fact that he reminded his publisher’s
sales reps of. “People with disabilities do not want or
need pity. What we need, most of all, is to be accepted for
who we are and given an opportunity to succeed like any-
one else.”
The authors say that until publishers acquire more books
like theirs, the opportunity to succeed will be denied to
too many, at the expense of writers and readers alike.
“Soliciting more books by disabled writers won’t address
the way disabled writers are perceived from the industry’s
nondisabled lens on what’s ‘compelling’ or ‘marketable,’ ”
Wong said. “Publishers need to create professional oppor-
tunities for disabled people who want to break into the
industry—especially editors. When we have more people
willing and open to identifying as disabled in publishing,
we will see a lot more fantastic work by disabled writers.
This is long overdue.” —Alex GreenJaipreet Virdi©
MAXPLANKSOCIETY, DAVIDAUSSERHOFER