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Breath & ShadowA Journal of Disability Culture and Literature
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Breath & Shadow is a collaborative effort by AbilityMaine's staff, Norman Meldrum and Steve Hoad; our fiscal sponsor, Resources for Organizing and Social Change (ROSC); and Breath & Shadow's own editorial staff, led by Sharon Wachsler, the Editor in Chief. Editorial Board: Editor in Chief About the Editor-in-Chief Sharon Wachsler is a humorist, disabilityrights activist, and dog trainer living in rural western Massachusetts. Ironically, before becoming disabled herself, Sharon worked as a disability information and referral specialist. When she became disabled by chronic fatigue immune dysfunction syndrome (CFIDS), multiple chemical sensitivity (MCS), fibromyalgia, and chronic migraines, Sharon started drawing "sick humor" cartoons http://www.sickhumorpostcards.com which began appearing in a range of disability, feminist, and queer publications. In February 2002, she began writing monthly humor columns for AbilityMaine, many of which have been reprinted elsewhere. The columns were the jumpingoff point for starting Breath & Shadow. Sharon has published over a hundred articles, short stories, essays, poems, and cartoons about disability (some of which have won awards) in more than thirty publications across North America and abroad, including translations into Dutch and German. She is frequently solicited for humor essays or for articles or interviews on disability humor. Examples include Abilities, Canada's disability lifestyle magazine; WAMC, the National Public Radio affiliate for much of New York and New England; The Women's Times, a Western Massachusetts newspaper; and Kaleidoscope, the longestextant disability literature journal. Her writing on disability has also been used in college curricula. One example is the University of California, San Diego, purchasing her 2003 feature from Bitch magazine for 800 textbooks. Sharon has been successful writing on topics other than disability, too. Her essays, poetry, fiction, and cartoons have appeared in severaldozen magazines, newspapers, chapbooks, and journals. She has been published (or has forthcoming work) in two dozen books, among them the 2004 and 2005 editions of Simon & Schuster's Best American Erotica series. Her fiction has appeared alongside such well-knowns as Kim Addonizio, Dorothy Allison, Steve Almond, Margaret Atwood, Alan Cumming, Molly Ivins, Joyce Carol Oates, Simon Sheppard, and Jane Smiley. Some of her writing credits are Best Lesbian Erotica, Suspect Thoughts, Harrington Lesbian Fiction Quarterly, Strange Horizons, Pinned Down by Pronouns, Yentl's Revenge, and Restricted Access. Honors include a Pushcart Prize nomination in 2001 for poetry and the "Best of the Nest" Peregrine Prize award from Amherst Writers and Artists in the same year, also for poetry. Her work has appeared in Lambda Literary Awardwinning and nominated anthologies in fiction and nonfiction, respectively. In 2006, the Astraea Foundation honored her with a fiction grant as a "2006 Emerging Lesbian Writer." Sharon's current big writing goal is to finish compiling her Sick Humor essays and cartoons into a book, Sick Humor: FullFrontal Disability. To get on Sharon's Sick Humor elist for sporadic bulletins on her writing, postcard specials, and cool disability humor and culture stuff, email sickhumor2@aol.com. To learn more about Sharon and her dogs, visit her homepage at http://www.sharonwachsler.com. About the Managing Editor Chris Kuell is a blind writer and advocate living in Western Connecticut. A former research chemist, he lost his sight at thirtyfive as a result of diabetic retinopathy. A few years later, he learned how to use a computer with speech output and turned his efforts to writing. He's had more than two dozen articles about blindness published, and His fiction has appeared in Spillway Review, Breath & Shadow, Apollo's Lyre, Gambit, Mountain Echoes, Decomposition, The Sun, and Dialogue. He was an editor and contributed to the anthology, Mountain Voices: Illuminating the Character of West Virginia. He is currently seeking an agent/publisher for Disconnected, a novel about how Alzheimer's disease affects a family and tests the bonds of love. He is also hard at work on his second novel, Rub It In, a novel about a blind massage therapist caught in a thorny love triangle. |
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