AWP Disability Caucus Executive Board is comprised of individuals who will serve two-year terms & be elected by Caucus members at the annual AWP conference. The Advisory Board will help guide the Executive Board’s decisions & contribute to overseeing committees & task forces.
According to our bylaws, nominations are accepted in election years during the Call for Agenda Items, which opens on the first day of the month that precedes the conference.
2018-2019 AWP Disability Caucus Executive Board
President: Sonya Huber
Sonya Huber’s new essay collection is called Pain Woman Takes Your Keys and Other Essays from a Nervous System. Her other books include Opa Nobody, Cover Me: A Health Insurance Memoir, The Evolution of Hillary Rodham Clinton and a textbook, The Backwards Research Guide for Writers. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Creative Nonfiction, Brevity, Fourth Genre, and other journals. She is a disabled writer who teaches at Fairfield University in Connecticut and directs Fairfield’s Low-Residency MFA Program.
Vice President: Cade Leebron
Cade Leebron is a writer living in Columbus, OH. She holds an MFA from Ohio State, where she served as an editor at The Journal. Her work has appeared in Brevity, Electric Literature, Day One, and elsewhere. Find her online at www.mslifeisbestlife.com or on Twitter @CadeyLadey.
Secretary: Jess Silfa
Jess Silfa is a writer and poet from the South Bronx. They graduated from Columbia University with a Bachelor’s in Psychology and live in Tampa Bay, Florida. Jess is currently working on their first novel about a tight-knit immigrant community as well as a chapbook of poems about the body. They have received a Displaced Artist Fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center, are a member of AWP’s Ad-Hoc Committee on Conference Accessibility, and currently serve as secretary for the Disabled and D/deaf Writers Caucus. You can follow Jess on Twitter @jesilfa.
Communications Coordinator: Molly McCully Brown
Molly McCully Brown is the author of the poetry collection The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded (Persea Books, 2017), which won the 2016 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize. With Susannah Nevison she is the co-author of the collection In the Field Between Us (forthcoming, Persea Books, 2020.) New work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Tin House, Pleiades, Crazyhorse, and The New York Times. She is a 2018 United States Artists Fellow and the 2018-2019 recipient of the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship.
2018-2019 AWP Disability Caucus Advisory Board
Meg Day
Meg Day is the 2015-2016 recipient of the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, a 2013 recipient of an NEA Fellowship in Poetry, and the author of Last Psalm at Sea Level (Barrow Street 2014), winner of the Barrow Street Poetry Prize and the Publishing Triangle’s Audre Lorde Award, & a finalist for the 2016 Kate Tufts Discovery Award from Claremont Graduate University. Day holds a Ph.D. in Poetry & Disability Poetics & is Assistant Professor of English & Creative Writing at Franklin & Marshall College and lives in Lancaster, PA. www.megday.com
Michael Northen
Michael Northen edits Wordgathering, A Journal of Disability and Poetry and is co-editor of the anthology Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability. For fourteen years he was facilitated the Inglis House Poetry Workshop for writers with disability. With Sheila Black he is currently editing an anthology of disability short fiction that will published in 2016. An educator for more than 40 years, Northen has taught adults with physical disabilities, women on public assistance, prisoners, and rural and inner city children.
Jillian Weise
Jillian Weise is the author of The Amputee’s Guide to Sex (Soft Skull Press, 2007), the novel The Colony (Soft Skull / Counterpoint, 2010) and The Book of Goodbyes (BOA Editions), which won the 2013 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. Her essays have appeared in A Public Space, The New York Times and Tin House. In response to AWP-16’s rejection of all panels on disability aesthetic, she created “AWP Tips for Writers by Tipsy Tullivan.” www.jillianweise.com
Disabled & D/deaf Writers Caucus 