Join the Arts & Culture Project at Access Living and Women & Children First Bookstore via Zoom Webinar to celebrate the release of We’ve Got This: Essays By Disabled Parents featuring Eliza Hull & Dani Izzie.

We’ve Got This: Essays By Disabled Parents is the first major anthology by parents with disabilities.

When writer and musician Eliza Hull was pregnant with her first child, like most parents-to-be she was a mix of excited and nervous. But as a person with a disability, there were added complexities. She wondered: Will the pregnancy be too hard? Will people judge me? Will I cope with the demands of parenting? More than 15 percent of people worldwide live with a disability, and many of them are also parents. And yet their stories are rarely shared, their experiences almost never reflected in parenting literature.

How does a father who is blind take his child to the park? How is a mother with dwarfism treated when she walks her child down the street? How do Deaf parents know when their baby cries in the night?

In We’ve Got This, parents around the world who identify as Deaf, disabled, or chronically ill discuss the highs and lows of their parenting journeys and reveal that the greatest obstacles lie in other people’s attitudes. The result is a moving, revelatory, and empowering anthology that tackles ableism head-on. As Rebekah Taussig writes, ‘Parenthood can tangle with grief and loss. Disability can include joy and abundance. And goddammit — disabled parents exist.’

Accessibility: This event will be hosted on Zoom Webinar with ASL and live captioning provided. For questions or other access needs, please email events@womenandchildrenfirst.com.

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Author Bios

Daniela (Dani) Izzie is a disability advocate and wheelchair user, and a new mom to twins. She works full-time in social media and advertising within the wheelchair industry. She holds a master’s in English literature with a focus on disability studies. As an advocate, her work centers on elevating voices of disabled parents, and she is the subject and producer of Dani’s Twins, an upcoming documentary about pregnancy and motherhood as a quadriplegic during the pandemic. A dual citizen of the United States and Italy, she now lives in rural Virginia with her husband, kids and trusty service dog.

Eliza Hull is a musical artist, writer, journalist, and disability advocate based in Victoria, Australia. Her podcast series on parenting with a disability, We’ve Got This, was one of Radio National’s and ABC Life’s most successful series of all time.

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Sponsor information:

This event is brought to you by the Arts and Culture Project at Access Living, an independent living center for people with disabilities, Bodies of Work: Network of Disability Art and Culture, and the Disability Culture Activism Lab (DCAL), a teaching lab housed under the department of art therapy and counseling at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. As a platform for creative disability art and advocacy projects, DCAL uses a peer support and collective care model in which disability community members and art therapy graduate students collaborate as disability culture makers for social change. Bodies of Work is a part of the Department of Disability and Human Development within the College of Applied Health Sciences at University of Illinois-Chicago.

The contents of this event were developed under a grant from the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research (NIDILRR grant number 90RTCP0005). NIDILRR is a Center within the Administration for Community Living (ACL), Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The contents of this book event do not necessarily represent the policy of NIDILRR, ACL, or HHS, and you should not assume endorsement by the Federal Government.

This program is partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency.