Prompts

Featured Books:
Disability Visibility — Alice Wong
Disability Intimacy — Alice Wong
Year of the Tiger — Alice Wong

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January is a memorial reading month honoring the life, work, and legacy of Alice Wong, whose writing and organizing shaped contemporary disability justice and culture. Beginning the year with her work grounds the Disability Reading Challenge in disability justice lineage, collective care, and political remembrance.

For this month, participants are invited to read any book by Alice Wong. You may read at your own pace, read partially, or engage through discussion without finishing the book.

Featured Book:
How to Be Disabled in a Pandemic — Mara Mills, Rayna Rapp, Faye Ginsburg, Harris Kornstein, with Judith Heumann

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This prompt explores care as a collective, political, and relational practice rather than an individual burden. It invites reflection on interdependence, caregiving, mutual aid, illness, and the systems that shape how care is given and received.

The featured book centers disabled perspectives on care during crisis and everyday life. You are welcome to read slowly, selectively, or choose another book that fits the theme.

Featured Book:
Against Technoableism — Ashley Shew

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This prompt focuses on the relationship between disability and technology, including access, assistive tools, medical technologies, digital life, and tech solutionism. It encourages critical engagement with how technology can both support and harm disabled people.

The featured book offers a clear, accessible critique of technoableism while centering disabled expertise and lived experience.

Featured Book:
The Unexpected Consequence of Bleeding on a Tuesday — Kelsey B. Toney

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This prompt centers stories of chronic illness, chronic pain, and long-term health conditions. Memoir, fiction, and essays that foreground lived experience and ongoing illness all fit this theme.

The featured novel brings chronic illness into fiction, offering a narrative-driven entry point into the prompt. Readers are encouraged to engage at their own pace and capacity.

Crip Kinship: The Disability Justice & Art Activism of Sins Invalid — Shayda Kafai

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This prompt focuses on disability community, kinship, collective care, and shared culture. It highlights how disabled people build meaning, support, and resistance together.

The featured book examines Sins Invalid’s art and activism as a model of disability justice community-building through creativity and collective practice.

Featured Book:
When My Ghost Sings by Tara Sidhoo Fraser

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This prompt explores the relationship between body and mind, including illness, pain, neurodivergence, and embodied experience. It invites readers to reflect on how disability shapes perception, thought, and daily life.

The featured memoir centers lived experience of the bodymind and offers a reflective, accessible way to engage with this theme.

Featured Book:
Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure — Eli Clare

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This prompt examines cure narratives and the cultural pressure to fix, recover, or overcome disability. It invites critical reflection on medicalization, normalcy, and resistance to being cured.

The featured book is a foundational disability justice text that interrogates cure while affirming disabled lives as whole and valuable.

Featured Book:
Parable of the Sower — Octavia Butler

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This prompt invites imagination and speculation about disabled futures, including how disabled people survive, adapt, and build worlds under changing conditions.

The featured novel offers a powerful speculative vision that explores community, resilience, and futurity in ways that resonate deeply with disability justice themes.

Featured Book:
King of the Neuro Verse — Idris Goodwin

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This prompt centers creativity as a disabled practice, including storytelling, world-building, art-making, and experimental forms. Creativity here is understood as a way of being and imagining otherwise.

The featured book models neurodivergent creativity through form, voice, and narrative experimentation.

Featured Book:
Authentic: The Myth of Bringing Your Full Self to Work — Jodi-Ann Burey

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This prompt examines how capitalism shapes disabled lives through labor, productivity, value, and access. It invites readers to think critically about work, worth, and institutional expectations.

The featured book offers a timely critique of authenticity, labor, and selfhood under capitalism that resonates with disabled experiences of work and exclusion.

Featured Book:
Deaf Republic — Ilya Kaminsky

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This prompt centers disabled joy as complex, collective, and sustaining rather than simplistic or inspirational. Joy may appear through connection, language, resistance, or shared meaning.

The featured poetry collection explores community, silence, and belonging, offering a powerful meditation on joy that exists alongside struggle.

Featured Book:
Head Above Water: Reflections on Illness — Shahd Alshammari

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This closing prompt centers rest, pacing, and gentleness. It invites readers to slow down, read reflectively, and resist productivity-driven reading habits.

The featured book’s short, reflective essays support partial reading and quiet engagement, making it well-suited to the end of the year.