July Reading Recommendations: Disability Pride Month!
Questions? Contact Rachel Lawyer, Library Instruction Specialist | rachel.lawyer@usu.edu
Join us this month as we celebrate Disability Pride Month, which is celebrated in July in honor of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in July 1990!
Like Real People Do by E.L. Massey
Libby Book of the Month! Enjoy throughout July with no wait times or holds!
A sweet, slow-burn queer sports romance and the first book in the Breakaway series. Alexander Price is the youngest captain in the NHL — brash and polarizing online, but privately a teenager wrestling with an anxiety disorder and a secret that could derail his career. Elijah Rodriguez is a mixed-race, disabled college freshman whose Olympic figure-skating dreams ended in an accident, and who is unapologetically out and outspoken. After a prickly first meeting, the two strike up an unlikely friendship that charms the internet — and slowly grows into something more, all while a watching, often disapproving world looks on.
Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body by Rebekah Taussig
A memoir-in-essays in which Taussig, paralyzed since early childhood, reflects on growing up as a disabled girl and woman in a world built for nondisabled bodies. She writes candidly about everyday moments — dating, work, family, and strangers' assumptions — to push past both pity and inspiration narratives and show what a resilient, fully realized disabled life actually looks like.
Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor
A genre-blending novel about Zelu, a disabled Nigerian American writer whose career and family life are upended when the science-fiction novel she writes becomes a runaway sensation. Okorafor braids Zelu's story together with the futuristic, robot-populated tale she is writing, exploring authorship, family, and what it means to remake your own narrative.
Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century by Alice Wong
A landmark anthology collecting first-person essays by disabled writers from across the United States. The pieces span identity, justice, intimacy, and survival, gathering a wide range of voices to capture the texture of contemporary disabled life in their own words.
Disability Pride: Dispatches from a Post-ADA World by Ben Mattlin
A wide-ranging report on the disability rights movement in the decades since the Americans with Disabilities Act. Drawing on interviews across a diverse community, Mattlin examines how a new generation has embraced disability as a source of identity and pride rather than something to overcome.
True Biz: A Novel by Sara Novic
A novel set at a residential school for the Deaf, following students and a headmistress as their lives, loves, and activism collide over the course of a turbulent year. Novic weaves in language, history, and the politics of Deaf culture and education.
Demystifying Disability: What to Know, What to Say, and How to Be an Ally by Emily Ladau
An approachable, practical guide to understanding disability and being a thoughtful ally. Ladau covers terminology, history, etiquette, and everyday situations, offering straightforward guidance for talking about and engaging with the disability community respectfully.
Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
A collection of essays exploring disability justice from a queer, disabled, and people-of-color-centered perspective. The author writes about building community, mutual aid, and sustainable forms of care and activism beyond mainstream disability frameworks.
Get a Life, Chloe Brown: A Novel by Talia Hibbert
A contemporary romance about Chloe Brown, a computer geek living with chronic illness, who decides to "get a life" after a brush with death and enlists her free-spirited building superintendent to help her work through a bucket list. Warm, funny, and steamy, it centers a chronically ill heroine in a genuine love story.
Empowering Students with Hidden Disabilities: A Path to Pride and Success by Margo Vreeburg Izzo and LeDerick R. Horne
A guide for educators, families, and self-advocates on supporting students with invisible disabilities such as ADHD, learning disabilities, and autism. Blending personal stories with research-based strategies, the authors lay out a "Path to Disability Pride" framework to help students advocate for themselves and thrive in the classroom and beyond.