A discussion & reading from memoirs—on the topic of writing about family & living with a disability.

Ona Gritz’s memoir, Everywhere I Look, received the Clara Johnson Award, the Readers’ Choice Gold Award, Pencraft’s Best Book Award, and was named StoryTrade’s Nonfiction Book of 2024. She writes verse novels teens, including Take a Sad Song, a Kirkus Reviews’ best YA title, and The Space You Left Behind, a Children's Book Council Disability Pride Month Recommended Read. Ona lives with her poet-husband Daniel Simpson in Lansdowne, PA. Her essays and poems have appeared widely.

Jason Irwin is the author of the memoir These Fragments I Have Shored, as well as the poetry collections, The History of Our Vagrancies, A Blister of Stars, and Watering the Dead. In 2022, he was a Zoeglossia Fellow and part of the Poetry Foundation’s Disability Poetics Project. He lives in Pittsburgh with his wife, writer Jen Ashburn.

Anne Kaier’s poetry collection, How Can I Say It Was Not Enough?, won the Propel Poetry Award and was published by Nine Mile Press and Syracuse University in 2025. Kaier’s memoir, They Said I Couldn’t Have a Love Life, was a Finalist for the AWP Non-fiction Prize. She and has served on a Fulbright screening committee for creative writers. Anne taught creative writing and English literature at Bryn Mawr College, Arcadia University and Penn State, Abington. She lives in Philadelphia.

Daniel Simpson has published three collections of poetry: School for the Blind, Border Songs: A Conversation in Poems with Ona Gritz), and Inside the Invisible. His work has been anthologized in About Us: Essays from the Disability Series of the New York Times, The Loss of a Lifetime, Welcome to the Resistance: Poetry as Protest, and Beauty Is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability, and has appeared widely in journals. Dan lives in Lansdowne, PA with his wife Ona Gritz.