Elsa Sjunneson
Thursday, April 6, 7pm
In-Person and Online
Join us for an evening with Elsa Sjunneson, WA State Book Award Winner and author of Being Seen: One DeafBlind Woman's Fight to End Ableism. Sjunneson will read from her book and take questions from the audience.
You can join us in-person at the library, located at 2021 9th Ave, Seattle WA 98121 or streaming live via Zoom. Registration is required to receive the event Zoom link.
Winner of the 2022 Washington State Book Award for Biography/Memoir, Being Seen: One DeafBlind Woman's Fight to End Ableism is part memoir, part cultural criticism, part history of the DeafBlind experience. Being Seen explores how our cultural concept of disability is more myth than fact, and the damage it does to us all.
Elsa Sjunneson, seven-time Hugo Award finalist, is a DeafBlind speculative fiction writer living in Seattle, Washington. She has been published in CNN Opinion, The Boston Globe, Metro UK, and Tor. Her work has been praised as “eloquence and activism” in lockstep and can be found all over the internet.
The Washington State Book Awards are a partnership of The Washington Center for the Book (an affiliate of The Library of Congress Center for the Book administered by Washington State Library) and The Seattle Public Library.
This event is put on in partnership with the Washington Center for the Book. For more information please contact us at 206-615-0400, or email [email protected].
ABOUT THE BOOK:
“Being Seen is a sharp, necessary book. Sjunneson's clarity of thought and entertaining prose illuminate her life and our world. A powerful and resonant reading experience.” —Kat Howard, Alex Award-winning author of An Unkindness of Magicians
“With sharpened words aimed squarely at a cultural image that marginalizes disabled women, Elsa Sjunneson is an emerging icon. Being Seen is her unkindest cut; sparing no one from the frank truth of her life as a DeafBlind woman and filleting the intersections of identity with her trademark incisive logic and vulnerable memoir. This book will leave scars.”—Meg Elison, author of Big Girl
“A riotous blend of memoir and cultural criticism that defies expectations on nearly every page. Being Seen persuasively argues that it is not only the disabled body that must adapt to the world but also the world that must adapt around the disabled body.” —M. Leona Godin, author of There Plant Eyes: A Personal and Cultural History of Blindness