One Book One Community 2023 Campus Read
The One Book One Community Committee is pleased to announce that the fall 2023 book choice is official!
Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body, by Rebekah Taussig, has been chosen as the campuswide common read, and Taussig will be coming to campus on Nov. 8 and 9 for a keynote and another event.
The committee worked diligently in spring 2023 to choose a book that its members believed would highlight an important topic that would resonate with people all across campus — from students, faculty and staff to the larger local community — and spark meaningful conversations.
Sitting Pretty is perfect for this goal in the opinion of the OBOC Committee chair, Lauren Copley Sabon, who said, “I felt called to action by this book and the way the author argues how accessibility is beneficial for everyone. I think her points about representation and the need for more and different stories to show the multipilicity of ways people live and experience life are very important for our campus and community.”
The One Book One Community Committee will have a table at Hillfest at the beginning of the semester to get the word out about the book and program along with getting people signed up for book clubs. The University of Arkansas Libraries will have copies of the book in various forms — physical, ebook, and audiobook. The OBOC Committee will also be giving away copies of the book to interested students, faculty and staff. There are also plans for a collaboration with Student Success and the Writing Studio, so keep on the lookout closer to the fall semester for updates!
Faculty interested in possibly adopting the book (or part of it) as an ancillary text for their fall courses are welcome to email onebook@uark.edu for information, ideas and a discussion guide.
MORE ABOUT REBEKAH TAUSSIG
Rebekah Taussig will challenge everything you think you know about disability as she invites us into her experience of living in a body that looks and moves differently than most. “What would it mean for disabled folks if society saw us as acceptable, equal, valuable parts of the whole?” she writes in her memoir, Sitting Pretty: The View From My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body (HarperOne).
Taussig, who has been paralyzed since the age of three, is a mom, wife, author, disability advocate and educator with a Ph.D in creative nonfiction and disability studies. Before pivoting to writing, speaking and consulting, Taussig taught passionately for almost a decade from freshmen in high school to upper-level college classes and continues to offer writing workshops. She is also one hell of a fighter on a mission to show that disabled people have incredible value; as she argues, a more inclusive world is a sturdier, kinder, more imaginative world for all of us.
A storyteller at heart with a great sense of humor, Taussig invites us to think bigger and more critically about who has a seat at the table and the barriers that bar others from inclusion. She’s held talks and workshops at the University of Michigan, Davidson College and Yale University on disability representation, identity and community, and her writing appears in publications from TIME to Refinery29. She’s been a guest on a myriad of podcasts and also runs the Instagram platform @sitting_pretty, where she crafts “mini-memoirs” for her more than 50,000 followers to contribute nuance to the collective narratives being told about disability in our culture. Taussig is the recipient of the Hefner Heitz Kansas Book Award in Literary Nonfiction for Sitting Pretty.
This story also appeared in the University of Arkansas News publication.