2021 Authors with Disabilities Leadership Book List

In support of National Disability Employment Awareness Month (NDEAM), we’ve compiled a list of leadership books written by authors with disabilities in the United States. This list is meant to be a resource, not an official endorsement. The books are not ranked in any particular order.

Download the full list below.

1. Disarm Your Limits: The flight formula to lift you to success and propel you to the next horizon by Jessica Cox
2. The White Album by Joan Didion
3. Chef Interrupted by Trevis Gleason 
4. Fall Down, Laughing: How Squiggy caught multiple sclerosis and didn’t tell nobody by David Lander
5. Speedbumps: Flooring it through Hollywood by Teri Garr
6. And Now We Are Going to Have a Party: Liner Notes to a Writer’s Early Life by Nicola Griffith
7. To Know As We Are Known: Education as Spiritual Journey by Parker Palmer
8. The World I Live In by Helen Keller
9. Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot  by John Callahan
10. Haben: The Deafblind Woman who Conquered Harvard Law by Haben Girma
11. Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation by Eli Clare
12. Wishful Drinking by Carrie Fisher
13. Unwritten Rules of Social Relationships: Decoding Social Mysteries Through Autism’s Unique Perspectives by Temple Grandin
14. Marbles: Mania, Depression Michelangelo, and Me by Ellen Forney
15. Strangers Assume My Girlfriend Is My Nurse by Shane Burcaw
16. I Am Schizophrenic: Poetry from a Beautiful Brain by Kerenza Ryan
17. Apocalyptic Best Practices: A Unique approach to fear and change by Elisebeth VanderWeil
18. You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me by Sherman Alexie
19. Being Huemann: An Unrepentant Memoir of a Disability Rights Activist by Judith E. Heumann
20. The Pretty One: On life, pop culture, disability, and other reasons to fall in love with my by Keah Brown
21. Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Diabled Body by Rebekah Taussig
22. Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century by Alice Wong
23. Nothing About Us Without Us: Disability Oppression and Empowerment by James I. Charlton
24. I Am Not a Label by Cerrie Burnell
25. Limitless: The Power of Hope and Resilience to Overcome Circumstances by Mallory Weggemann
26. Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
27. Life in the Mind Interrupted: Essays on Mental Health and Disability in Higher Education by Katie Rose Guest Pryal
28. Rolling Warrior: The Incredible, Sometimes Awkward, True Story of a Rebel Girl on Wheels Who Helped Spark a Revolution by Judith Heumann
29. The Disability Experience: Working Toward Belonging by Hannalora Leavitt
30. When the Chant Comes by Kay Ulanday Barrett
31. The Story of My Life by Helen Keller
32. Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger’s by John Elder Robison
33. Be Different by John Elder Robison
34. Switched On: A Memoir of Brain Change and Emotional Awakening by John Elder Robison
35. Moving Violations: Warzones, Wheelchairs, and Declarations of Independence  by John Hockenberry
36. Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability and Making Space by Amanda Leduc
37. Thinking in Pictures: My Life with Autism by Temple Grandin
38. Calling all Minds: How to Think and Create Like an Inventor by Temple Grandin
39. The Way I See It: A Personal Look at Autism and Asperger’s by Temple Grandin
40. Unwritten Rules of Social Relationships: Decoding social mysteries through autism’s unique perspectives by Temple Grandin
41. Golem Girl by Riva Lehrer
42. Find Another Dream by Maysoon Zayid
43. Too Late to Die Young: Nearly True Tales from a Life by Harriet McBryde Johnson
44. If at Birth You Don’t Succeed: My Adventures with Disaster and Destiny by Zach Anner
45. Fading Scars: My Queer Disability History by Corbett O’Toole
46. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson
47. Staring: How We Look by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson
48. Elegy for a Disease: A Personal and Cultural History of Polio by Anne Finger
49. Waist-High in the World: A Life Among the Nondisabled by Nancy Mairs
50. In the Province of God by Kenny Fries
51. The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin’s Theory by Kenny Fries
52. Body, Remember: A Memoir by Kennie Fries
53. Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life by Margaret Price 
54. The Obsessive Joy of Autism by Julia Bascom 
55. Blind: A Memoir by Belo Cipriani 
56. Count Us In: Growing Up with Down Syndrome by Jason Kingley and Mitchell Levitz
57. Holding Change: The Way of Emergent Strategy Facilitation and Mediation by Adrienne Maree Brown
58. Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good by Adrienne Maree Brown
59. Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling With Cure by Eli Clare
60. Feminist Queer Crip by Alison Kafer
61. ASL Saved My Life…Until it didn’t by Jenni Kleinman Berebitsky

We are continually adding to this list. If you have any recommended additions please send us an email at info@curiositybased.com so we can add it here.

Interested in reading more? Check out our Hispanic/Latino/Latinx-Authored Leadership Booklist!

Read our other leadership booklists too!

• Leadership Books Authored by Women
• Black-Authored Leadership Booklist 
• AI/AN-Authored Leadership Booklist
• LGBTQ-Authored Leadership Booklist
• AAPI-Authored Leadership Booklist