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

This publication is included in the Autistic Autism Scholarship Project. one author of this publication is identified as autistic in the project.

About the autistic author marker

Savarese, D. J. & Savarese, R. J. (2025). Enmeshing Selves, Words, and Media, or Two Life Writers in One Family Talk about Art and Disability. Adoption & Culture, 13(1), 40-55. https://doi.org/10.1353/ado.2025.a967816

Publication date: 1 Jan 2025 Added to AutiHub: 29 Sep 2026 Type: Article Article language: English

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Authors

Publication authors
2
Publication authors identified as autistic
1 / 2 (50.0%)

Abstract

abstract: 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 films. 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, where he directs The Lives in Progress Collective. An OSF Human Rights Initiative Youth Fellow (2017–2019) 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 seven books and co-edited four 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.

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