I think of myself as an essayist. Sometimes the work is more creative, other time it’s more critical. Always, it’s an effort to figure out something I don’t know, to go somewhere new and unexpected. Currently, I’m completing work on a memoir-in-essays about my work as an ASL-English interpreter as a disabled person who grew up with a deaf parent. My in-progress academic projects focus on care and disability, literacy and technology, social justice and pedagogy. Like much of my students’ academic work, mine is often composed in a dialogue between traditional prose and digital forms and genres.
Creative Writing
Prior to arriving in the English program, I was, and I continue to be, a teacher who draws his authority from his work as a writer. My essays have been cited as “Notable” in Best American Essays, nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and appear in Apogee and The Millions, and are part of a memoir-in-essays, The Intimate Register. You can read that work on my publications page.
The Intimate Register
The Intimate Register is a memoir on disability and language, particularly my work as a sign language interpreter and my childhood growing up in a special needs family. The story narrates life lived in a rebelling body, a childhood in a special needs family between two languages, and an adult life making one’s own family at an intersection that blends brown and white, disabled and able-bodied, northeastern and southwestern in a world where gender norms remain heavily policed, where illness as a way of being continues to be persistently erased, and where the most private conversations are the hardest to have because of the walls we put between ourselves in a divided society.
The plot of the story is my career arc as an American Sign Language (ASL)-English interpreter. The first part of the book largely takes place at work, before circling back in the early second part to the period before I began working. I grew up using sign with one of my parents, who was late deafened, then studied it in college, including six months at the all-Deaf Gallaudet University. While working, I focus on two years working in an elementary school in the Bronx. After a year at home with my kids, I return to work at a high school in Manhattan, where a combination of rust, exhaustion, and subtle changes to my body and brain lead me to crash and burn, transferring to a less challenging assignment, then to a job teaching interpreters at the college where I’d trained, before that program closed its doors and left me to deal honestly, at last, with my only body and brain.
Academic Writing
My academic research focuses in the interdisciplinary areas of disability, literacy, and technology. The lens that connects these areas is feminist ethics of care—a mode of thinking never more necessary than during an ongoing global pandemic. My main question, I told a colleague the other day, might boil down to the old line from Lydia Fecteau: “Who gets the care and the food?”
Careful Compositions and Careless Constructions
My project here at CUNY examines the interplay between literacy events and care practices to see what it says about power. The project spans texts from 1817 to the present over four parts. Two parts focus on overlaps between disability and the digital. Two more focus on rereading about liberation movements through the lens of care. As an example: one section uses care theory to ‘crip’ critiques of the construction of the post-war university, particularly the development of university composition in the 1970s, which enabled exclusion in ways thoughtful teachers are still untangling. The form of this work, which mixes new media genres alongside more traditional approaches, prepares me to both produce a meaningful book and they inform the way I teach undergraduates to put their ideas as well as their voice and their sense of play into the work they do in school and out.
Digital Projects
The “Left Handed Penmanship” Contest of 1866-7: Ohio
This project, created with Knight Labs’ StoryMaps, examines an archive of disabled life writing from immediately after the Civil War. (You can use the map below, but especially on a smartphone, for the best experience use this link). The map looks closely at 25 writers from Ohio who had been disabled in combat and had to relearn handwriting due to the nature of their injuries. I examine these texts through lenses of disability studies, literacy studies, rhetorical genre theory, and as sources for open pedagogy.
Modifier Keys (in production)
The project uses the interview form to invite more college instructors into an ongoing, decade-old but newly essential conversation about collective access and disability justice. In Fall 2021, I conducted a pilot set of IRB-approved interviews with five disabled writers who work as college writing instructors. These interviews, recorded and transcribed on Zoom, created a corpus of conversations and an accompanying website with resources related to disability pedagogy. The project is called Modifier Keys because, according to Dummies.Com “A modifier key works in combination with other keys to do various interesting and unbelievable things.” Control; Option; Alt; Command. I personally love this definition—in which careful combinations lead to the interesting and the unbelievable—because it sounds like what the best college teachers do in their best college teaching. It’s not always what does happen in higher education, though. And that’s what Modifier Keys aims to address by emphasizing the possibilities offered by combination. The site aims to model and spark more dialogue between teachers about our designs, that is, the plans we make with our pedagogy and our technology. I see these conversations as field-neutral, even as this is a project written “in the key of first-year writing.” Like many writers, I’ve taught composition for many years. It’s a required course for a reason: literacy impacts academic success, student engagement, and intellectual independence. Access literacy, then, is a tactic in the broader effort to make pedagogy more abolitionist. It is, in short, something instructors need to develop to better serve all our students.
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