Rebekah Taussig
Rebekah Taussig will challenge everything you think you know about disability as she invites us into her experience of living in a body that looks and moves differently than most. “What would it mean for disabled folks if society saw us as acceptable, equal, valuable parts of the whole?” she writes in her memoir, Sitting Pretty: The View From My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body (HarperOne).
Rebekah, who has been paralyzed since the age of three, is a mom, wife, author, disability advocate and educator with a PhD in creative nonfiction and disability studies. She is a passionate teacher with a range of experience, from freshmen in high school to upper-level college classes covering subjects from English literature, composition and creative writing to disability studies.
She is also one hell of a fighter on a mission to show that disabled people have incredible value; as she argues, a more inclusive world is a sturdier, kinder, more imaginative world for all of us.
A storyteller at heart with a great sense of humor, Rebekah invites us to think bigger and more critically about who has a seat at the table and the barriers that bar others from inclusion. She’s held talks and workshops at the University of Michigan, Davidson College and Yale University on disability representation, identity and community, and her writing appears in publications from TIME to Design*Sponge. She’s been a guest on a myriad of podcasts and also runs the Instagram platform @sitting_pretty, where she crafts “mini-memoirs” for her more than 50,000 followers to contribute nuance to the collective narratives being told about disability in our culture. Rebekah is the recipient of the Hefner Heitz Kansas Book Award in Literary Nonfiction for Sitting Pretty.