47th Annual Literary Festival at ODU: October 6-11, 2024

Rebekah Taussig: 47th Annual ODU Literary Festival

Rebekah Taussig

Document Type

Presentation

Festival Date

10-8-2024

Location

Chartway Arena’s Big Blue Room, Old Dominion University

Author/Artist Bio

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).

Taussig, who has been paralyzed since the age of three, is a mom, wife, author, disability advocate and educator with a Ph.D in creative nonfiction and disability studies. Before pivoting to writing, speaking, and consulting, Taussig taught passionately for almost a decade from freshmen in high school to upper-level college classes and continues to offer writing workshops.

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, Taussig 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 Refinery29. 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. Taussig is the recipient of the Hefner Heitz Kansas Book Award in Literary Nonfiction for Sitting Pretty.

Description

The reading took place on Tuesday, October 8, 2024, at 7 p.m. in the Chartway Arena’s Big Blue Room as part of the NEA Big Read event in partnership with the ODU Office of Institutional Equity and Diversity. Topics included “Rethinking What Accessibility & Inclusion Look Like”; “Why Accessibility Is Important to All of Us”; “Leadership: There is Nothing Artificial About AI — Access & Inclusion”; and, “Healthcare: Transforming the Patient Experience.”

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