10 2SLGBTQ+ Disabled Authors to Read This Pride Month – Book Riot

Bisexual Taiwanese American author Esmé Weijun Wang writes both fiction and nonfiction. Her essay collection The Collected Schizophrenias is, hands down, one of the best books discussing mental illness that I have ever read. Wang possesses an ability to convey the complex reality of living with a condition that society fears and often vilifies. She captures on page the struggle that many people with Schizophrenia face on a daily basis.

Jen Campbell is a former bookseller turned author who writes everything, from poetry to children’s picture books. Much of her writing centers ideas around disability and disfigurement. Over on her YouTube Channel, Campbell shares her experience with EEC Syndrome, which is a form of Ectodermal Dysplasia, and discusses disfigurement representation in the media. Her most recent book, The Sister Who Ate Her Brothers, features retellings of some of the world’s creepiest fairy tales.

Kay Ulanday Barrett (aka @BrownRoundBoi) is a disabled Filipinx Amerikan transgender queer poet and performer. Their poetry collection, More Than Organs, is a ALA Stonewall Honor Books and a Lambda Literary finalist. Back in 2020, Alice Wong did an excellent Q&A with Barrett for Disability Visibility, a project that highlights disabled people and their work.

Proud bisexual Keah Brown, a writer and actress, might be most well-known for starting the #DisabledAndCute hashtag, encouraging other disabled people to share hot selfies of themselves. Her book, The Pretty One, follows Brown’s life as a Black woman living with cerebral palsy.

Laura Kate Dale is an autistic trans writer and content creator. Twitch streaming, YouTube videos, podcasting — she does it all! In 2019, she published Uncomfortable Labels: My Life as a Gay Autistic Trans Woman, in which she shares how she came to realize that she wasn’t a neurotypical heterosexual boy that she thought she was.

A Black, intersex, genderqueer disabled author, Rivers Solomon is most well known for faer speculative fiction. Faer debut novel, The Unkindness of Ghosts, was a Stonewall Book Award Honor Book and a finalist for the 2018 Locus Award, John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and the Lambda Literary Award. Faer’s second book, Sorrowland, came out in 2021 to much acclaim, and was named A New York Times Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Book of 2021. Fae have also written shorter pieces, like the essay “Black Girl Going Mad” in Guernica and “Blood Is Another Word for Hunger” on Tor.com.

While many readers know Talia Hibbert from her Brown Sisters series, Hibbert has been writing romance novels for a long time. Hibbert has written 17 romance novels that feature a diverse cast of characters following in love and finally reaching their happily ever after. Hibbert’s characters are often inspired by Hibbert’s own experience as a neurodivergent, disabled, chronically ill Black woman living in the UK.