A couple days ago I sat on a panel at Chicago Shedd Aquarium with a theater director, a mother of three school-aged children, and a lawyer. Theater director Brian Balcom uses a wheelchair, one of Laurie Viets’ children is on the autism spectrum, attorney Rachel Arfa is profoundly deaf and uses bilateral cochlear implants to […]

Some writers in the Memoir-writing classes I lead have had their memoirs published, but none has ever won an award (with a cash prize, no less!) for their writing…until now. A poem Andrea Kelton wrote has been awarded a cash prize for Second-Place in the Magnets and Ladders poetry contest! Andrea’s poem What a Feeling will […]

An NPR story this past week reported that a theatregoer who is blind is suing the producers and the theater that’s offering the hit musical “Hamilton” in New York City because they are not offering headsets with live audio description for theater-goers who are blind or have visual impairments. You regular blog readers know that […]

The snow this week has a lot of people asking me if my dog Whitney likes being out in winter weather. Truth is, she doesn’t have much choice. Poor guide dogs, they never get a day off work! The snow started falling in Chicago Sunday, and it was still coming down last night. Snowy weather […]

I subscribe to something called The Writer’s Almanac and wake up every morning to a poem and an email message listing things that went on in the literary world that day in history. Today’s listing includes something about writer and publisher Dave Eggers that I thought worth sharing here. I could still see when I […]