This is a page where I will link to future events and appearances, and archive old ones if they are not too humiliating.
UPCOMING
There are no upcoming events worth speaking of at this time.
ARCHIVE
There are no past events worth speaking of at this time.
The Country of the Blind: a Memoir at the End of Sight, my book about the world of blindness — and finding my place in it — is forthcoming from Penguin Press. You can pre-order a copy here.
A roundtable discussion I moderated with four blind and low-vision artists was the cover story of Art in America magazine’s October 2022 Disability Issue.
“DeafBlind Communities May Be Creating a New Language of Touch,” a web feature I wrote for the New Yorker, won the 2023 Journalism Award from the Linguistic Society of America.
I wrote a feature for the New York Times Magazine about the controversy surrounding a TV show that cast a sighted actress in a blind role, and how it lead me to reconsider the ways in which people — blind, sighted, or, like me, somewhere in between — perform disability, and what blindness is supposed to look like.
I wrote about Joe Frank and experimental public radio for the New York Review Daily.
I wrote an essay, “The ADA-Compliant Elevator of Literature,” about accessibility and writing, for McSweeney’s 64, and an essay about visual art and blindness, “Self-Portrait in an Open Medicine Cabinet,” for Mcsweeney’s 50.
I started an email newsletter that I have never and possibly will never use to send any emails.
I have written other things, mostly criticism and essays, for a variety of other publications. Links to these occasionally appear amid my punishingly banal observations on Twitter.
I interviewed John Lee Clark about his (superb) new poetry collection, How to Communicate, for the New Yorker Radio Hour.
I reported a story about disability and space travel for Radiolab. For the story, I got to fly on the “vomit comet,” a.k.a. a parabolic zero-g airplane, along with a group of aspiring disabled astronauts (with a tiny microphone taped to my forehead).
I was the senior producer on issue 64 of McSweeney’s,
“the Audio Issue” (for which I also wrote an essay, called “The ADA-Compliant Elevator of Literature”). More information on that issue is available here.
I produced an episode of 99 Percent Invisible about blindness and reading called “The Universal Page.”
Between 2013 and 2019, I hosted and produced 107 episodes of the Organist, an arts-and-culture podcast from KCRW and the Believer/McSweeney’s. In the final season, I produced a few episodes that took a more personal turn, which lead me toward writing about disability, which I now do quite a bit. These include episodes about blindness and narrative form, Stevie Wonder truthers, and art and illness.