Private Bodies/Public Encounters: Susan Nussbaum at GW October 6

PEN/Bellweather Prize Winner Susan Nussbaum

Our first event in the Private Bodies/Public Encounters series will occur on Monday, October 6 from 7-9 PM in 309 Marvin Center.  The event features novelist and playwright, Susan Nussbaum, from Chicago.  Susan’s novel, “Good Kings Bad Kings”, details the lives and struggles of a multi-racial group of disabled youth institutionalized at the outskirts of the Windy City.  The novel powerfully explores, as few others have done before it, the alternative subjectivities and lives of interdependency developed as survival mechanisms by the incarcerated characters.  Last year the novel was awarded the prestigious PEN/Bellweather Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction.

Private Bodies/Public Encounters
October Disability Studies Series

Susan Nussbaum is a longtime social justice and disability rights activist.  She originally came onto the arts scene as a playwright and her work has been produced at influential performance venues such as: Second City, Victory Gardens, and Live Bait Theaters. Her play Mishuganismo, first produced by Remains Theatre, is included in the disability arts anthology, Staring Back: The Disability Experience from the Inside Out, and her play No One As Nasty is included in the anthology of disabled playwrights, Beyond Victims and Villains: Contemporary Plays by Playwrights with Disabilities. In 2008 Susan was cited by the Utne Reader as one of "50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World" for her work with girls and young women with disabilities.  Her disability advocacy work started in 1980 at the Independent Living Center, Access Living, where she also created the Empowered Fe Fes (slang for female), a support, sexuality, and disability identity group for girls, which over the years, has included over 300 participants.

This event is co-sponsored by the GW Creative Writing Program, Disability Support Services, Women's Studies, Philosophy, The University Writing Program, the Digital Humanities Institute, the Vice Provost's Office for Diversity and Inclusion, and Africana Studies.

Private Bodies/Public Encounters is the first in a series of Disability Studies programming for Fall 2014.