The Disability Reading Challenge is excited to continue its partnership with The Ruby, hosting the next installment of its monthly virtual book club series.
The Disability Reading Challenge is a year-long community reading initiative exploring disability representation, disability justice, and disabled storytelling across genres and lived experiences. Through monthly reading prompts, featured books, and community discussions, the challenge invites participants to engage with disability narratives in whatever way feels accessible to them.
For our October discussion, we'll be reading Authentic: The Myth of Bringing Your Full Self to Work by Jodi-Ann Burey.
Jodi-Ann Burey is a writer, critic, and speaker working at the intersections of race, culture, and health equity, best known for her TED talk “The Myth of Bringing Your Full, Authentic Self to Work.” In this book, Burey examines why calls to “come as you are” can be dishonest and risky, especially for people facing racism, ableism, and other forms of discrimination. Drawing on pop culture, academic research, and interviews with other professionals of color, she argues that workplace “authenticity” is too often a cycle of trading on our identities when it’s convenient and profitable. Her questions about disclosure in environments not built for our well-being resonate deeply with disability justice conversations about access, accommodation, and collective care.
Whether you've finished the book, read only a few chapters, are reading another book related to October's theme of Disability and Capitalism, or simply want to listen and participate in the conversation, you're welcome. There is no expectation that you've finished the book—or even read it at all. You're invited to participate in whatever way feels accessible to you.
The discussion will take place virtually via Zoom.
This continued partnership with The Ruby expands the Disability Reading Challenge's existing community discussions, creating another welcoming space for disabled and nondisabled readers alike to explore literature, identity, and disability justice together.
About the Facilitators
Emily Craven is a queer chronically ill book-lover living in Northern California. As a community organizer, blogger and general rabble-rouser she has focused on supporting her folks and making invisible illness visible. She has been involved in building grassroots online communities by and for housebound, bedbound people with poorly understood severe chronic illness. And in developing strategies to leverage the burgeoning Web 2.0 to translate in-the-streets activism to a bedbound movement, ultimately known as #MillionsMissing. She has written about using tangible objects, personal artifacts, and physical space to locate, chronicle and contextualize chronic illness, lending visibility to the invisible. And so, so, many public stakeholder comments.
Geetanshi Sharma is a writer, educator, advocate, and community organizer whose work centers disability justice and inclusive storytelling. She is the founder and facilitator of the Disability Reading Challenge, a global community reading initiative exploring disability representation and disabled storytelling, and is a current Creative in Residence at The Ruby. She has taught creative writing courses focused on decolonization and global perspectives at San Francisco State University and previously worked in accessibility in the tech industry. She writes growing in the margins on Substack and hosts Characters Like Us, a podcast featuring authors writing from the margins.