We are currently compiling a working bibliography of disability literature.
If you have written, taught, or know of a book by a disabled author or about disability, please consider contacting us directly or filling out this form. Thank you to Emily Rose Cole for contributing entries to this list.
Disability literature lists
Book List compiled by DisLit/Wordgathering
Fiction
Toni Morrison, Sula (1978)
Poetry
Jillian Wiese, The Colony
Nonfiction
Sandra Beasley, Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl
Maia Dolphin-Krute, Visceral: Essays on Illness as Not Metaphor
Roxane Gay, Hunger
Sonya Huber, Pain Woman Takes Your Keys and Other Essays from a Nervous System
Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals (1980)
Porochista Khakpour, Sick: A Memoir
Stephen Kuusisto, Planet of the Blind; Have Dog, Will Travel
Emily Rapp, Still Point of the Turning World
Esmé Weijun Wang, “Toward a Pathology of the Possessed”, The Collected Schizophrenias
Multi-Genre/Other
Raymond Luczak, ed. Queer Disability Anthology
Theory/Analysis
Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization
Donna J. Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” (1985)
Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making & Unmaking of the World (1987)
Arthur W. Frank, The Wounded Storyteller: Illness, Body and Ethics (1995)
Rosemarie Garland Thompson, Freakery (1996)
Kenny Fries, ed. Staring Back: Disability Experience from the Inside Out
Michele Lent Hirsch, Invisible: How Young Women With Serious Health Issues Navigate Work, Relationships, and the Pressure to Seem Just Fine
Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies (1997)
Eli Clare, Exile & Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation (1999)
David Mitchell & Sharon Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis (2001)
Rachel Adams, Sideshow USA: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination (2001)
Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others
John M Barry, The Great Influenza
Robert McRuer, Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness & Disability
Harriet Washington, Medical Apartheid
Pricilla Wald, Contagious: Cultures, Carriers and the Outbreak Narrative
Disabled & D/deaf Writers Caucus 