Writing Disability and Chronic Illness

Jeannine Hall Gailey

The subjects of disability and chronic illness in writing can be difficult to capture, especially for authors whose lives are impacted by these experiences. In this tutorial, poet Jeannine Hall Gailey refers to her lived experience in navigating these writing topics as she discusses how the body impacts our writing, how authors can reclaim their disability and/or chronic illness, and how to both accommodate and resist the gaze of abled readers. 

About the Instructor: 

Jeannine Hall Gailey served as the second Poet Laureate of Redmond, Washington. She is the author of six books of poetry: Becoming the Villainess, She Returns to the Floating World, which was a finalist for the 2012 Eric Hoffer Montaigne Medal and a winner of a Florida Publishers Association Presidential Award for Poetry, Unexplained Fevers, The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, and winner of the Moon City Press Book Prize and SFPA’s Elgin Award, Field Guide to the End of the World. Her sixth poetry book, Flare, Corona, is upcoming from BOA Editions. She’s also the author of PR for Poets: A Guidebook to Publicity and Marketing. She has a B.S. in Biology and an M.A. in English from the University of Cincinnati, as well as an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Pacific University. Her poems have been featured on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac and on Verse Daily; two were included in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. In 2007 she received a Washington State Artist Trust GAP Grant and in 2007 and 2011 a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize.