Issue 23: Disability Contributors
Allison Baldwin is a poet, essayist, and disability advocate. Her work has been published in the Right to Life Anthology by Folkways Press, The Bluebird Word and, most recently, Elixir Verse Equinox: Stella Verses by Elixir Verse Press. She holds an MFA in Poetry and Poetic Medicine from Dominican University of California and is currently a columnist for The Poetry Lab where she writes bimonthly articles on poetic craft. Instagram
Apoorva Bisht is a textile artist with a keen interest in illustration. She is based in New Delhi, India and works independently with export houses to create design ideas/samples for various brands and design houses. She is currently exploring illustrations through hand embroidery, a medium close to her heart.
Leanne Charette (she/her) has cerebral palsy and writes poetry grounded in her experience as a disabled adoptee and mother. Her work has been published by Eavesdrop, PRISM International, Vallum Magazine, and more. She lives in the unceded territory of the Anishnaabe, Haudenosaunee and Neutral peoples, in so-called Kitchener, Ontario with her husband and twin sons.
Christa Couture is an award-winning performing and recording artist, non-fiction writer, filmmaker and broadcaster. She is also proudly Indigenous (mixed Cree and Scandinavian), queer, disabled, and a mom. Over the course of her acclaimed career, Christa has become known, unenviably, as an expert in loss: singing, speaking and writing about the childhood cancer that led to the amputation of her left leg, abortion, and the tragic deaths of her two infant sons. When it came time to make her fourth album, 2016’s eclectic, upbeat and twangy Long Time Leaving, a more run-of-the-mill loss, divorce, provided inspiration. Prairie-raised, Christa spent 17 years in Vancouver and now calls Toronto home. Website / Instagram
Em Cussen is a radically tender, wholehearted writer exploring their interconnected experiences of neurodivergence, sensuality, and radical intimacy. Em is the author of Period Pieces / a year in menstruation (2024) and published in Feels (2023, 2024) and Carousel Collective (2023) zines. Em is an advocate for the Oxford comma, audibly says hello to the moon, and believes silly socks are superior. They are particularly passionate about alliteration. Queer, genderfluid, and autistic – Em is a super feeler, wish chip seeker, and recovering people pleaser. Website / Instagram
Micah Delman-Allen is a white, lesbian, chronically ill and disabled person, writer, and recovery peer living in Springfield, Oregon, USA. They have ME/CFS and are Mad. Micah writes to explore the grief and joy of being alive in a way that power and productivity can't understand.
Matthew D. Del Papa
Born and raised in Capreol, ON Matthew D. Del Papa learned to love reading in high school… mostly due to the lack of girls at the all-boy Catholic institution. He graduated from Laurentian University with an Arts degree and delusions of literary talent. Since that time, he has read voraciously, written occasionally, and worked hard at convincing his family that struggling writers are supposed to live rent-free in the basement. All with mixed success. A member of the Sudbury Writers’ Guild, Matthew has been featured in local newspapers and websites, co-authored a sold-out fundraising novella for charity, self-published more than a dozen hyper-local titles, and contributed to Spooky Sudbury: True Tales of the Eerie & Unexplained (Dundurn Press, 2014), the Aurora Award-winning Nothing Without Us Too (Renaissance Press, 2022), MIGHTY: An Anthology of Disabled Superheroes (Renaissance Press, 2023) and Sudbury Superstack: A Changing Skyline (2024).
Faye Harnest is an illustrator focused on disability art and graphic medicine. She is drawing a memoir about living with brain injury, and experimenting with creating art objects that care for people. She recently moved from Toronto to Brooklyn, New York. Website / Instagram
Andrew Heule (he/him) is a limb-different amputee, musician, performer, educator, and emerging writer. His work increasingly explores radical accessibility, finding new ways of creating and performing that honour disability in all its forms, and placing care and access front and centre from beginning to end. He lives in tkaronto (Toronto, ON) with his partner, his ancient dog and all his plant babies.
Jasmine Jones is a 42 year old disabled abstract artist on Kaurna land. She is inspired by the natural world, of pregnancy and babies, of friendship, of her pet chickens in her work
Seán Carson Kinsella (nêhi(th/y)aw/otipêmisiwak/
BEE LB is an array of letters, bound to impulse; a writer creating delicate connections. they have called any number of places home; currently, a single yellow wall on unceded Anishinaabe land in Michigan. they have been published in FOLIO, Figure 1, The Offing, and Harpur Palate, among others. Website / Patreon
Sean Lee is an artist and curator exploring the assertion of disability art as the last avant-garde. His methodology explores crip curatorial practices as a means to resist traditional aesthetic idealities. Orienting towards a “crip horizon”, Sean’s practice explores the transformative possibilities of accessibility as an embodied politic and disability community building as a way to desire the ways disability can disrupt. Sean holds a B.A. in Arts Management and Studio from the University of Toronto, Scarborough and is currently the Director of Programming at Tangled Art + Disability.
Kirsty Martinsen is a painter, writer, filmmaker and performer who lives and works on Kauna land (Adelaide, South Australia). She has a BA Visual Art from UniSA, and a Grad Diploma in Painting from NY Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture. In a world of fast decisions, literalness, the need to know and be told how to think and feel, Kirsty Martinsen is interested in the opposite. She’s interested in the quiet, slow surrendering of explanations, and the layers and textures of our relationship with ourselves. In 2016 she approached New York Theatre Director Erwin Maas to collaborate with her on a self portrait performance idea called BODINESS, based on her changing relationship with her own body due to MS. In 2024 BODINESS was included in the Adelaide Festival’s Neoterica exhibition finisage, and the inSPACE Creative Development Program at the Adelaide Festival Centre. An abiding love of drawing and colour plus the focus on her body continues throughout every aspect of her work and BODINESS is the umbrella everything fits under. Her latest work Bodiness: skin with be part of A Second Body group exhibition with Catherine Lepp and Becky Kinder at Equity Gallery in NY, March 6 2025.
Emma McKenna (she/her) is a disabled and chronically ill writer and researcher with a passion for feminist narratives and histories. Emma was born on Vancouver Island, spent her childhood in Alberta, and now lives in Southern Ontario with her partner and two Shih Tzus. Instagram
Bec Miriam Bec (they/them) is an interdisciplinary artist from Southern California, with work seen in BFI Future Film Festival, Lassitude Zine, Brussels Independent Film Festival, among others. Bec is motivated by accessibility, justice, and community care. Their practice is heavily informed by their personal experiences as Disabled, Neurodivergent, and Queer. They are also the founder of RestFest Film Festival, a virtual festival & online gathering space created by/for Disabled, Deaf, chronically ill, Neurodivergent, mentally ill, and/or mad community worldwide. Website / Instagram
linds mueller (they/them) is a nonbinary, chronically ill writer & artist living in the hudson valley on stolen unceded Mohican & Munsee Lenape lands. Instagram / Substack
Nu is a disability rights scholar, activist, author at Penguin Random House India and founder of Revival Disability India, a collective for and by disabled queer community.
Stellan Aguilar Oreopoulos is a 9-year-old boy who lives in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. He has nonspeaking autism and uses a letterboard to communicate his thoughts and responses. Stellan loves to write stories, comics, and poetry. His interests include math, swimming, and indoor rock climbing. Stellan hopes that feelings of belief in nonspeaking communication will grow.
Mary Poirier [she/they] is a writer from Hamilton, Ontario. Their writing is inspired by their interactions as a hard-of-hearing, lesbian, and Filipino artist. She has an advanced diploma in Fashion Arts from Seneca College. She is currently working on her debut novel. Her poetry has been published in Queer Toronto Literary Magazine and Fifth Wheel Press. She loves her dog Mavis. She is an aesthetician by day and a writer by night. Work / Instagram
Catherine Richards (she/her) is a writer living in Cobourg, Ontario, and survived a ruptured brain aneurysm during the pandemic. She is writing a memoir of her experience and is an advocate for invisible disability and brain injury. She is also a passionate supporter, consumer and defender of the arts and propels this personal mission through her leadership role in municipal government. Instagram
jes sachse
Presently living in Tkaronto, jes sachse is an artist, writer and dancer who addresses the negotiations of bodies moving in public/private space and the work of their care. Often found marrying poetry with large scale sculptural forms, their work has been presented and supported by Dancemakers, the Centre de Création et Recherche O Vertigo (Montréal), Harbourfront Centre, among other centres. Their work has appeared in and been profiled by NOW Magazine, The Peak, Canadian Art, C Magazine, CV2 -The Canadian Journal of Poetry and Critical Writing, Mobilizing Metaphor: Art, Culture and Disability Activism in Canada, and the 40th Anniversary Edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves.
Kylie Steinhardt
Rhyan Stoned is not a workhorse, but a show pony. She is a magical being whose magical practices focus on the preservation of the self through spirituality in liminal spaces in order to create new possibilities and experiences - which can literally mean anything. You can find her in her bedroom. Blog / Instagram
Mitch Robinson has been a member of Mimico SNAP (Special Needs Adult Program) since 2019, after graduating from T.L. Kennedy High School in Mississauga. His passion for photography began in 2015 when he received his first camera for his birthday. Mitch particularly enjoys wildlife, nature, and macro photography, seeing the beauty in animals, flowers, and insects.
Michael Russell (he/they) is the queer, mad mother monster behind two chapbooks, gallery of heartache (forthcoming from 845 Press) and Grindr Opera (Frog Hollow Press). They are the coauthor of chapbook Split Jawed with Elena Bentley (forthcoming from Collusion Books). As always, he thinks you're fantabulous. Instagram
Francis Tomkins is an artist, accessibility worker, and spoonie living in Toronto, Canada. Their art keeps them company. Instagram
Rita Winkler is a woman living with Down syndrome. She was born in Calgary, Alberta, and currently lives in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The foundation for Rita’s art journey was laid by the excellent art program at DANI-Toronto, her day program. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Rita joined a Zoom art class offered by L’Arche London, which introduced her to watercolours as a medium. Watercolours are now Rita’s primary medium, sometimes supplemented with ink and acrylic paint/pens. Rita’s mom, Helen, devises adaptive techniques to allow Rita to overcome disability-related barriers to the art creation process. Rita, Helen, and her Uncle Mark Winkler collaborated on a children’s book, My Art, My World, recently published by Second Story Press. It tells the story of Rita’s day-to-day life through her art and offers a message of inclusion. Website / Facebook / Instagram
Rebecca Wood lives with her plants and craft supplies in Toronto, Canada. She delights in writing as a playful exploration of being human and what it means to exist in a body with multiple chronic illnesses and episodic disability. Her work can be found in Wordgathering: A Journal of Disability Poetry and Literature, Corporeal, The Blood Project and Pinhole Poetry. Her poem, Emergency Contact, received an honourable mention in the League of Canadian Poet’s 2024 Summer contest. Work / Bluesky
Nestor Wynrush curated The Live Mixtape and consultated on The Mentorship Program. Elliott Walsh (Nestor Wynrush) is a Winnipeg based emcee, singer, producer, and workshop facilitator. An artist of limited output but quality works. This first-generation Canadian taps his Caribbean roots to cook up an authentic pot-au-feu that can aptly be described as Winnipeg Rap with a dash of Red River x West Indian Soul. The regular day to day with a melange of thoughts exploring family, love, identity and accessibility weave between every rhythm. Ultimately, it’s sincere and unvarnished storytelling music.
K Zimmer