People with Disabilities

Oksana Masters was born in Ukraine—in the shadow of Chernobyl—seemingly with the odds stacked against her. She came into the world with one kidney, a partial stomach, six toes on each foot, webbed fingers, no right bicep, and no thumbs.

When Abraham Verghese, a physician whose marriage is unraveling, relocates to El Paso, Texas, he hopes to make a fresh start as a staff member at the county hospital....

A moving account of resilience, hope, fear, and mortality and how these things resonate in our lives, by actor and advocate Michael J. Fox....

In this extraordinary memoir, Sabrina Greenlee, the indomitable mother of NFL sensation DeAndre Hopkins, unveils her journey of triumph over adversity—a saga of tenacity, redemption, faith, and the profound reclamation of personal power.

A memoir by one of America’s most accomplished public servants and legal thinkers—who spent years denying and working around his blindness, before finally embracing it as an essential part of his identity....

Paige Layle was normal. She lived in the countryside with her mom, dad, and brother Graham. She went to school, hung out with friends, and all the while everything seemed so much harder than it needed to be. A break in routine threw off the whole day....

Witty, winning, and revelatory, The Country of the Blind is a personal narrative of the author’s transition from sightedness to blindness and his quest to learn about blindness as a rich culture all its own.

This intimate memoir reveals the woman inside one of autism’s most prominent figures, Jennifer O'Toole. At the age of 35, Jennifer was diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome, and for the first time in her life, things made sense....

They all thought he was gone. But he was alive and trapped inside his own body for ten years....

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....

Russell Joyce, born with a rare craniofacial disorder called Goldenhar syndrome, tells how the broken places of our lives can be transformed when Jesus meets us in the realities of our woundedness.

Follow Michael and his guide dog, Roselle, as their lives are changed forever by two explosions and 1,463 stairs. In this harrowing story of trust and courage, discover how blindness and a bond between dog and man saved lives and brought hope during one of America’s darkest days....

Ever since he was small, John Robison had longed to connect with other people, but by the time he was a teenager, his odd habits had earned him the label "social deviant"....

A memoir-in-essays from disability advocate and creator of the Instagram account @sitting_pretty Rebekah Taussig, processing a lifetime of memories to paint a beautiful, nuanced portrait of a body that looks and moves differently than most....

The incredible life story of Haben Girma, the first Deafblind graduate of Harvard Law School, and her amazing journey from isolation to the world stage....

In this unprecedented book, Grandin delivers a report from the country of autism....

In 2011, three years after leaving the NFL, Steve Gleason was diagnosed with ALS, a terminal disease that paralyzes the entire body. Doctors gave him three years to live. He was thirty-four years old. As Steve says, he is now ten years past his expiration date....

A riveting and candid account of a young journalist's awakening to a life of chronic illness, weaving together her personal story with reporting to shed light on how Americans live with long-term diagnoses today....

The Christian classic detailing the remarkable events surrounding the 1967 diving accident that left Joni Eareckson Tada paralyzed. This special 45th anniversary edition of Joni commemorates the worldwide impact of her life story to people living with disabilities....

From the author of the groundbreaking anthology Disability Visibility comes another revolutionary collection of first-person writing on the joys and challenges of the modern disability experience, and intimacy in all its myriad forms....

Soundtrack of Silence asks listeners to run the soundtrack of their own lives through their minds. It’s an involving memoir of a young man who discovered he was going completely deaf just at the moment he’d fallen in love for the first time....

A neuro-diverse writer, advocate, and father meditates on his life, offering the radical message that we should stop trying to fix people and start empowering them to succeed....

Blinded at age three, Mike May defied expectations and never yearned for vision. Then, in 1999, came startling news: a revolutionary stem-cell transplant surgery could restore May's sight....

So begins Chloé Cooper Jones’s bold, revealing account of moving through the world in a body that looks different than most. Jones learned early on to factor “pain calculations” into every plan, every situation.

A young man once called unteachable journeys across America to investigate the lives of those, like himself, who are forced to create new ways of living in order to survive....

Being blind, Debby has had many of those experiences, as a parent, counselor, grandparent and someone who simply loves life. Her faith in a God who loves us shifts that frightening scenario into one of confidence and peace. In this book, through stories and poetry, she describes some of those moments where she has walked by faith, not by sight, both spiritually and literally.

Russell Joyce was born with a rare craniofacial disorder called Goldenhar syndrome, where the left side of his face was not formed. Years of patchwork surgeries made him more outwardly presentable, but not without deep pain and physical and emotional scars. But a life-changing encounter broke through to him with a power he never thought possible, in the very place he never thought to look—his broken face. This set Russell on a journey to understand what was hindering him and others from experiencing the power of God's grace and being truly set free.

Blindness. A tough topic to discuss? Not anymore. In this groundbreaking book, listeners will see blindness in a whole new light. In fact, the compelling and entertaining stories will not only change perceptions of blindness, they’ll make listeners forget the people featured are actually blind.

No one would ever guess that simply hanging curtains could be life-changing! In the blink of an eye, Paula's world turned upside down as a broken leg morphed into life threatening events that pushed her reality into a darkness we only see in movies. Legless tells the story of Paula's fight to triumph over heartbreaking trauma while depression and suffering snapped at her desire to live. Unwilling to surrender for the sake of her family, she dug deep into the meaning of life at every setback and found herself changed, transformed and seeing herself through the eyes of a new normal.

In 2004, Mindy begins hearing a voice in her head, someone she calls "Joe," and sees signs everywhere that hold mysterious clues only for her. What she doesn't know at the time is that she is experiencing her first schizophrenic episode. For the next decade, she oscillates between two worlds -- a normal life and a secret voice-filled one -- until she begins the journey of merging her two worlds back into one. Becoming Whole documents her onset of schizophrenia and the subsequent years spent learning about it and how to live with it. It is her journey to find solace.

Sabrina Greenlee was born to teenage parents in the shadow of South Carolina’s Clemson University, and her story unfolds against the backdrop of her challenging upbringing in a family that lacked the means—financial and emotional—to offer her and her two brothers the safety, comfort, and love every child deserves. When she was a teenager, her beloved younger brother, Dilly, died in a drunk driving accident. In her early twenties, Sabrina faced the tragic loss of her fiancé and one true love. A decade later, she was brutally and publicly assaulted, resulting in the loss of her vision.

Navigating a Life with Disability? Raising a Special Needs (or whatever you're calling, today) Child? Read This: A Pathway Guide Through Adversity with Quiet Candor and Humor (because you're gonna need it!)... Disability: An Anecdotal Field Guide for the Rest of Us offers firsthand wisdom and practical tips for navigating life with a disability. Drawing on her own experiences as a woman with muscular dystrophy, Tracee Garner covers topics from advocacy to employment, mental health to emergency preparedness. Written in an engaging conversational tone, this “field guide” shares key ...

In Morant's "Letters to My Son, Rōman," an authentic real-time journal, the author of the #1 release, "The Happy Has Been," shares his personal love letters to his son, Rōman, begun while still occupying Mom's belly. It was later, before Rōman's second year, that he was diagnosed with "severe autism," non-verbal in nature.

This Autistic Girl Went to Japan is the inspiring story of a young woman who moved halfway around the world in pursuit of happiness. With humor and remarkable candor, Bianca describes the challenges of applying for a visa during a time of terrifying uncertainty, slogging through endless red tape, and the loneliness that comes with being a stranger in a strange land. Oh, and how she wound up evicting a bat from her new apartment, attending a Pokémon GO event with a bunch of middle-aged women, and discovering the best thrift store in all of Tokyo.

This exceptional piece of work was motivated by the current Coronavirus/COVID-19 pandemic which continues to claim the lives of thousands of people across the World. It brought back memories of real and extraordinary short stories of individuals (known to me and including me), who have experienced threats to life’s span, and happened to bounce back remarkably well.

With evocative storytelling and incisive research, Katie Rose Guest Pryal brings a new eye to the mental health crisis that higher education has faced for decades. Written from the perspective of a bipolar-autistic professor, A Light in the Tower is both a bracing account of the mental health crisis in higher education and a passionate and informed proposal for how to teach with mental health in mind. Pryal contends that higher education's mental health crisis is the result of long-term systemic problems in education that demand nothing short of a revolution.

I Kept Walking opens in 1940s Tehran when a misguided prank leaves three- year-old Minou frozen in fear. Days later, a doctor breaks the news to her mother: "Your daughter has polio." To understand why nothing is as it seems-the cause of her polio or why her dutiful Jewish mother, who was married off at 13, thwarted her dream of marriage, Minou must flee Iran and confront the psychological toll of her polio. I Kept Walking is the audacious account of a bold young woman who was unwilling to be crushed by polio or the prohibitions of a conservative society.

Ambition to succeed was inborn before the days of sight-saving classes and the many provisions now available. This book is her achievement. Her ambition was to teach teachers.

This is a story in Victorian England of how in 1884 Frederick Treves, Surgeon and Lecturer in Anatomy at the London Hospital arranged for the "Elephant Man" (whose distorted grotesque face and deformed body made him a "freak") to visit the medical college next to the hospital for the purpose of a lecture. They would later become friends and Treves the savior of the man named John Merrick. This is Treves' memoir.

In God’s Got Jokes, author Neosho C. Ponder, allows the listener into the most personal and vulnerable parts of her life. As she battled the hardships of cancer, she learned that some of those who supported her succumbed to their own battles of cancer. You will hear stories such as: Being evicted during chemotherapy, which finally led to her seeing the humor and not choosing to give up. The financial adversity that affects cancer patients too sick to work, those undergoing treatments, and multiple surgeries.