Enmeshing Selves, Words and Media, or Two Life Writers in One Family Talk about Art and Disability

Two life writers in the same family--one neurotypical, one autistic—converse about the mountain of material they’ve produced: poems, memoir, essays, scholarship, and documentary film. Preferring to conceive of their work as interdependent and enmeshed, not bound by the strictures of identity politics and thus separate or conflicting, they advance a neurocosmopolitan and rhizomatous understanding of the self in words.  David James “DJ” Savarese is an artful activist, writer, teacher, and Co-Chair of The Alliance for Citizen-Directed Supports. An OSF Human Rights Initiative Youth Fellow (2017-19) and co-producer, narrator, and star of the Peabody award-winning documentary Deej: Inclusion Shouldn’t Be a Lottery, he publishes poems, creative nonfiction, and scholarly essays. Ralph James Savarese has authored five books and co-edited three collections, including the first on neurodiversity. He has received awards from the Herman Melville Society, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Mellon Foundation, which funded a neurohumanities fellowship at Duke University’s Institute for Brain Sciences. He teaches at Grinnell College.