The Future of Disability Studies: Conversation with Therí A. Pickens, Tananarive Due, and Juliann Anesi

UCLA Disability Studies invites you to an online conversation with Therí A. Pickens, Tananarive Due, and Juliann Anesi to discuss Dr. Picken’s new book, Black Madness :: Mad Blackness, (Duke University Press in 2019).

The event will have CART captioning, ASL interpretation, and be recorded.

For questions or requests related to disability access, please email disabilitystudies@college.ucla.edu by April 1, 2022.

She has just published her second monograph, Black Madness :: Mad Blackness, (Duke University Press in 2019) which explores the connection between Blackness and madness. She aims to architect a series of conversations that retool our theory and praxis for and about the Black mad and the mad Black. Her first book New Body Politics: Narrating Arab and Black Identity in the Contemporary United States (Routledge, 2014), which asks: How does a story about embodied experience transform from mere anecdote to social and political critique? She ushered in a new set of conversations about Blackness and Disability when she guest edited the 50th anniversary issue of African American Review (Summer 2017). She also followed up with another special issue on Blackness and Disability in the College Language Association Journal (Winter 2021).

A leading voice in black speculative fiction for more than 20 years, Due has won an American Book Award, an NAACP Image Award, and a British Fantasy Award, and her writing has been included in best-of-the-year anthologies. Her books include Ghost Summer: Stories, My Soul to Keep, and The Good House. She and her late mother, civil rights activist Patricia Stephens Due, co-authored Freedom in the Family: a Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights. She is married to author Steven Barnes, with whom she collaborates on screenplays. They live with their son, Jason, and two cats.

As a community educator and activist, she has also worked with non-profit organizations and schools in American Sāmoa, California, Hawai`i, New York and Sāmoa. Juliann’s work has appeared in venues including Disability and the Global South, Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600 to 2000; and Disability & Society. She is currently at work on a book manuscript, Tautua: Women’s Disability Activism in Sāmoa.