[AWP Offsite] Stuttering & Writing: Five Authors on Speech Disability in Literature

Amid the welcome attention now paid to writers with disabilities, stuttering continues to receive scant notice. 

This panel, comprised of writers who themselves stutter and have made it the theme of their works, will discuss with the audience why and how they have come to to write, in prose and verse, about stammering in an otherwise fluent world. Participants include Adam Giannelli, Amy Reardon, Jordan Scott, David Shields and John Whittier Treat.

Adam Giannelli s the author of Tremulous Hinge, winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize. He is also the translator of a selection of prose poems by Marosa di Giorgio, Diadem (BOA Editions, 2012), which was shortlisted for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, and the editor of High Lonesome (Oberlin College Press, 2006), a collection of critical essays on Charles Wright. His writing has appeared in the Kenyon Review, New England Review, New York Times Magazine, Washington Post Magazine, Ploughshares, Yale Review, and elsewhere. His work has been supported by fellowships and residencies from several institutions, including the National Endowment for the Arts, Fulbright Program, James Merrill House, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Yaddo, and MacDowell. He has taught at Oberlin, Hamilton, and Colby Colleges. He is a person who stutters.

Amy Reardon is a novelist interested in narratives that center women and others interrogating default hierarchies. Educated in the California public schools, she earned an MFA at UC Riverside Palm Desert and a BS in journalism at Cal Poly SLO. Her work has appeared in The Believer, Alta Journal, Electric Literature, Glamour, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Hippocampus, The Common, The Rumpus, Adroit Journal, and The Coachella Review, where she also served as fiction editor. Her work was selected as a finalist for the 2020 Penelope Niven Prize for Creative Nonfiction by the Center for Women Writers.

Jordan Scott is a poet and children’s author. His debut children’s book, I Talk Like a River (illustrated by Sydney Smith), was a New York Times best Children’s Book of 2020. I Talk Like a River is translated into nineteen languages and was the recipient of the American Library Association’s, Schneider Family Book Award, which honors authors for the artistic expression of the disability experience. I Talk Like a River has won numerous international awards and was nominated for the Governor General’s Literary Prize for Young People’s Literature. Scott is also the author of four books of poetry and the recipient of the Latner Writers’ Trust Poetry Prize, given to a mid-career poet in recognition of a remarkable body of work, and in anticipation of future contributions to Canadian poetry.

David Shields is the internationally bestselling author of more than twenty books, including Reality Hunger (recently named one of the most important books of the last decade by Lit Hub), The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead (New York Times bestseller), Black Planet (finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award), and Other People: Takes & Mistakes (NYTBR Editors’ Choice). A recipient of Guggenheim and NEA fellowships, a senior contributing editor of Conjunctions, and the Loren Douglas Milliman  Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at the University of Washington in Seattle, Shields has published fiction and nonfiction in the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, Esquire, Yale Review, Salon, Slate, Tin House, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Believer, Huffington Post, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Best American Essays. His work has been translated into two dozen languages.

John Whittier Treat has lived in the Pacific Northwest, including Alaska, for forty years. His fiction has won the Christopher Hewitt Prize, and been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His novel The Rise and Fall of the Yellow House, was a finalist for the 2016 Lambda Prize for Best Gay Fiction. A novella, Maid Service, was published in 2020 and his second novel, First Consonants, released by Jaded Ibis Press in 2022. His opinion pieces have appeared in the New York Times and the Huffington Post. Treat is currently at work on his third novel, set among survivalists in rural eastern Washington State, entitled The Sixth City of Refuge.