Stephen Kuusisto
Poet, Author, Advocate for the Disabled, Stephen Kuusisto
As taken from Stephen's website: http://www.stephenkuusisto.com/
Poet, author, and advocate for those with disabilities, Professor Stephen Kuusisto, who has been blind since birth, is the author of“Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening” and the acclaimed memoir “Planet of the Blind”, a New York Times “Notable Book of the Year”. He has also published “Only Bread, Only Light“, a collection of poems from Copper Canyon Press, and Letters to Borges, also from Copper Canyon Press.
Steve is recognized by the New York Times as “a powerful writer with a musical ear for language and a gift for emotional candor.”
AN EXCERPT from Stephen’s recording:
When I was a child it was very clear, growing up in the 1950s and early 1960s, that being a person with a disability made me an outlier. Teachers didn’t want me in public school. My mother did want me in public school because she thought that I really would have a limited experience of life if I went to The Perkins School for the Blind in Watertown, Massachusetts. She felt strongly that I should live in the world. But the world was very conditional. It was long before the Americans with Disabilities Act. And so early in my life, I felt a sense of ostracism and loneliness. Able-bodied kids didn’t want me to play with them. There were no sporting programs for kids with disabilities. And so my world became the world familiar I think to all artists who discover the arts early in life. It became an isolated and rather beautiful – but very private – kind of experience. Even by the age of seven or eight, I had a very, very intense kind of inner life. And that inner life a lot of artists will tell you – whether they’re dancers or painters or poets – that they early on had that sense of the wonder and strangeness of being alive.
A graduate of the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa, and a Fulbright Scholar, Steve holds the position of director of the Renée Crown University Honors Program at Syracuse University where he holds a University Professorship in the Center on Human Policy. He speaks widely on diversity, disability, education, and public policy. His essays and poems have appeared in numerous anthologies and literary magazines including Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, Poetry, and Partisan Review.
