June 2020 (Volume 14, Issue 2) is the 54th issue of Wordgathering. Diane R. Wiener (Editor-in-Chief) is grateful for ongoing and outstanding collaborative support from her esteemed colleagues at Syracuse University—Kate Deibel, Patrick Williams, and Rachael Zubal-Ruggieri.
Immense gratitude goes to: Gatherer’s Blog Editor, Ona Gritz; Prose Editor, Sean J. Mahoney; and Poetry Editor, Emily K. Michael.
Amy Cohen Efron, Michael Northen, Liz Whiteacre, and Diane R. Wiener reviewed books for this issue. This issue’s Gatherer’s Blog was written by Liv Mammone; the Reading Loop was written by Clark A. Pomerleau.
”That 1 Jet Hockey Game” (by Raymond Luczak) was audio recorded by David Cummer. “Deconstruction” (by Ana Garza G’z), “Input/Output” (by Ana Garza G’z), “Brl” (by Nicholas Racheotes), and “Colorado” (by Nicholas Racheotes) were audio recorded by Diane R. Wiener. Other poems were audio recorded by the poets, themselves.
Wordgathering‘s Founding Emeritus Editors are Stuart Sanderson, Dana Hirsch, Yvette Green, and Denise March.
As this June 2020 issue goes “to press,” virtually, it is important to underscore some historic contexts and contemporary moments. Indeed, as the summer is underway, negotiating life during a global pandemic remains a vivid, complicated, and painful reality. Disability poetry, literature, and the arts continue to provide our contributors, journal visitors, and many other interested parties and constituents with cultural opportunities for expression, engagement, critique, and reflection, while living during and through COVID-19–and beyond. We have lost many Disabled people to the virus, as it disproportionally affects Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) with Disabilities, Disabled people who are marginalized economically, and many other members of our collective communities.
Simultaneously, we are bearing witness—not just visually, of course—to a global insurgency, in solidarity with Black Lives Matter and other activist groups, working against racist, ableist, and other forms of (frequently intersectional) oppression and brutality. For these and so many other reasons, commitments to “CripLit” remain vital and timely. The publication of the June 2020 issue of Wordgathering coincides with the publication of Alice Wong’s edited volume, Disability Visibility: First Person Stories from the 21st Century (reviewed in this issue). Wong’s new text, along with everything published by and reviewed in Wordgathering (in this issue, and always!), are profound examples of CripLit’s abundance, nuances, and impact.
On July 26, 2020, many will celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Timing is important, and it is with deep gratitude to Kate Deibel that we can celebrate this moment (and well beyond) with 13 years of Wordgathering archives and legacy issues now available on our website. Every issue since the journal’s inception is included. The legacy issues of Wordgathering are from before Syracuse University’s Office of Interdisciplinary Programs and Outreach at the Burton Blatt Institute (BBI) and Syracuse University Libraries assumed publication (in December 2019). These legacy pages are presented in their original HTML formatting, until they can be properly transitioned to the current site—which will happen gradually, over time.
Yet another milestone in this June issue is the beginning of a new phase in Wordgathering’s approach to publishing: effective immediately, all work will be published under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license. For more information, visit Frequently Asked Questions about Open Access, our Creative Commons license, and Fair Use, and please feel free to email us at wordgathering@syr.edu, if you have further questions. Heartfelt thanks to Patrick Williams for his steadfast, brilliant assistance in getting Wordgathering fully on board as an Open Access journal.
We hope that you find this issue meaningful, helpfully provocative, and relevant.
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