Are you disabled? Want to write an article for the blog? Make sure you match what we’re looking for in terms of contributors.
If you already have a great topic in mind, email us. If not, we have some thought-starters:
- being a teen/student with your disability
- common assumptions about your disability
- clichés, tropes, and stereotypes in fiction
- discussing/showcasing assistive technology
- the family dynamics of being a disabled sibling, child, or parent
- media criticism of disabled portrayals
- why disability representation is important
- if you belong to multiple marginalized groups, how do these identities intersect?
- interviewing an author about a disabled character they’ve written
In general, try to stick to one of these requirements:
- does it discuss portrayals of disability in fiction in any way?
- if about your experiences, is it information that would be valuable to people reading or writing about disabled characters?
We’ll accept posts between 400 and 4000 words, with a sweet spot between 500 and 2000.
While we occasionally run posts about people’s general experiences with their disability, we’re not a broader disability blog, and we prefer posts to be about a specific topic such as the ones mentioned above. We believe that all disability-related topics are relevant to people interested in writing or reading about disabled characters, as it’s part of learning about the broader disability experience, but we’d love it if you could explicitly relate your post back to writing or reading about disabled characters in some way.
As mentioned, we require all posts about a particular disability to be written by people who share that disability, or one that’s similar. Mentioning disabilities not your own in posts about disability as a broader concept is fine, though.
While we don’t mind if you mention your novel or website if it’s relevant to your post topic, we’d like to steer away from posts that are too self-promotional. Instead, we suggest discussing specific aspects of your work, e.g. a trope that bothers you that you wanted to turn on its head, or your own experiences growing up disabled and how you transformed those into an SFF setting. Keep in mind that we’re happy to add a book cover and blurb at the end of each post, so people will see your book regardless of your post topic.
If all of that sounds good to you, e-mail us at disabilityinkidlit@gmail.com!
Disability in Kidlit 