Being Seen: One Deafblind Woman’s Fight to End Ableism

Join us for the Diversity Common Reader 2023 Keynote! Elsa Sjunneson is an award winning Deafblind author and editor living in Seattle, Washington. Her fiction and nonfiction writing has been praised as “eloquence and activism in lockstep” and has been published in dozens of venues around the world. In 2022 her book, Being Seen won the Washington State Book Award for biography and memoir. She has been a Hugo Award finalist nine times, and has won three Hugo awards, an Aurora Award, and  and a BFA award for her editorial work.

When she isn’t writing, Sjunneson works to dismantle structural ableism and rebuild community support for disabled people everywhere. Her work includes her debut memoir Being Seen: One Deafblind Woman’s Fight to End Ableism, her Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla novel Sword of the White Horse, and her episode for Radiolab “The Helen Keller Exorcism.”