Propel Disability Poetry Book Series
The Propel Series honors the best in disability poetry with publication and awards.
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More often than not, the poetry community prioritizes diversity by publishing and promoting minority and female writers, while disabled poets do not receive similar attention. The Propel Disability Poetry Book Series remedies that gap. This series is a new imprint publishing poetry written by disabled poets, edited by disabled poets produced by Nine Mile and underwritten with generous support from Propel and the Poetry Foundation.
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“Disability poetry relates a rich, complex, and interesting element of the human experience.”
~Stephen Kuusisto, Editor
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Propel Disability Poetry Book Series
​​​​Human experience is variable like shades of grass. If you ask poets, the latter is the case. If you ask disabled poets, you’ll learn about “disability gain”—where disability is not defined by loss, it is instead a source of insight. The term “disability gain” comes from the Deaf community, which indicates, among other things, there is a freshness deep down. While non-disabled writers know this to be true, mainstream poetry continues portraying disablement as a calamity.
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What can we learn from poetry about crippled bodies and the culture of disability? Is what we find in a poem merely a figurative illustration of extrinsic historical or political truths, or do poets create fresh bindings of identity and consciousness?
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Sample poems from the Propel books can be read in the Fall 2023, Fall 2024, and Fall 2025 issues of Nine Mile Magazine.
We use the term disability to mean any physical, mental, sensory, or developmental difference that limits full participation in life activities, including barriers that stem from a lack of understanding, accessibility, and equality within society and its institutions.
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Nine Mile has been publishing its magazine and books on a consistent basis since 2013. The press published an historic 380-page double issue featuring Neurodivergent, Disability, Deaf, Mad, and Crip poets in 2019, and the press remains committed to advancing disability poetry. Nine Mile has also been an integral part of programming, mentorship, and instruction by and for disabled writers for several years.
*The Propel Poetry Award is granted for a book-length collection of poems by a crip/disabled poet at any career stage.
Propel Editors
Sheila Black
Sheila Black is the author of six poetry collections and three chapbooks, most recently Cinnamon Fire (Next Page Press, 2026). She is also co-editor of Beauty Is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability, a landmark anthology in contemporary disability poetics. Her honors include a 2026 Creative West Fellowship and a 2012 Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, selected by Philip Levine. Her poems and essays have appeared in Ploughshares, Kenyon Review Online, Poetry, The Nation, The New York Times, and elsewhere. With Jennifer Bartlett and Connie Voisine, she co-founded Zoeglossia, a nonprofit organization dedicated to building community for poets with disabilities. She lives in Tempe, Arizona, where she serves as Assistant Director of the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University.
Ona Gritz
Ona Gritz writes memoir, essays, & poetry for adults, and fiction & verse novels for children and teens. Her memoir Everywhere I Look received the Clara Johnson Award in Women’s Literature, the Pencraft Best Book Award in Memoir, the Readers’ Choice Gold Award for Best Adult Book, and was named an Independent Book Review 2024 Must-Read, a Kirkus Reviews’ “Indie Worth Discovering,” and the StoryTrade Nonfiction Book of the Year. Ona’s nonfiction has appeared widely, including in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Utne Reader, Brevity, Parents, The Rumpus, and River Teeth. Her honors include two Notable mentions in The Best American Essays and a Best Life Story in Salon. Ona’s 2024 verse novel Take a Sad Song was selected as one of Kirkus Reviews’ best YA titles of the year. Her picture book, Tangerines and Tea, My Grandparents and Me, was named Best Alphabet Book by Nick Jr. Family Magazine and a Best Book of the Year by Scholastic Parent & Child Magazine. Ona’s poetry collection Geode was a finalist for the Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award. Her poems can be found in Ploughshares, The Bellevue Literary Review, One Art, Catamaran Literary Reader, Stone Gathering, SWWIM, Literary Mama, and elsewhere. In 2020, she won The Poetry Archive Now: Wordview 2020 Project. A columnist for Literary Mama for many years, Ona is currently the blog editor for Wordgathering. She lives with her husband, writer Daniel Simpson, near Philadelphia. Together, they teach online poetry and prose workshops through The Writers Voice of Central New York.
Stephen Kuusisto
Stephen Kuusisto is the author of the memoirs Have Dog, Will Travel; Planet of the Blind (a New York Times “Notable Book of the Year”); and Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening and of the poetry collections Close Escapes; Old Horse, What Is to Be Done?; Only Bread, Only Light; and Letters to Borges. A graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and a Fulbright Scholar, he has taught at the University of Iowa, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, and Ohio State University. He currently teaches at Syracuse University where he holds a University Professorship in Disability Studies. He is a frequent speaker in the US and abroad. His website is StephenKuusisto.com.
Travis Chi Wing Lau
Travis Chi Wing Lau (he/him/his) is Assistant Professor of English at Kenyon College. His research and teaching focus on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature and culture, health humanities, and disability studies. Alongside his scholarship, he has been published widely in venues of public scholarship and poetry, including three chapbooks—The Bone Setter (Damaged Goods Press, 2019), Paring (Finishing Line Press, 2020), Vagaries (Fork Tine Press, 2022)—and a full-length collection of poems, What’s Left Is Tender (Harbor Editions, 2025). He is also co-editor of Every Place on the Map Is Disabled, an anthology of disability poetry and poetics published with Northwestern University Press in 2026. He was the winner of the Christopher Hewitt Award for Poetry (2019), recipient of the Greater Columbus Arts Council’s Artists Elevated Award in Literature (2024), and the Ohio Arts Council's Artists with Disabilities Access Program Grant (2025). Visit his website at: travisclau.com.
Dana Henry Martin
Dana Henry Martin (they, she, any) is a nonbinary, queer poet and cancer survivor living at the intersection of complex disability and chronic illness. They live and write with immune system dysregulation, post-viral sequelae, neurodivergence, and mental-health issues. Martin’s debut full-length collection, Crude, is forthcoming in 2027 from Nine Mile Press as part of the Propel Disability Poetry Book Series. Their chapbooks include Love and Cruelty (Meat for Tea, forthcoming 2026), No Sea Here (Moon in the Rye Press, 2026), and Toward What Is Awful (YesYes Books, 2013). Their work has appeared in The Adroit Journal, Barrow Street, CALYX Journal, Muzzle, New Letters, and elsewhere. They've also worked as a medical writer, patient advocate, and peer specialist. This spring, they co-launched a local initiative for mental-health support, education, and connection in Southwest Utah called Greater Zion Support Alliance.
Daniel Simpson
Daniel Simpson’s School for the Blind was published in 2014 by Poets Wear Prada. He and his wife, Ona Gritz, co-authored Border Songs: A Conversation in Poems (Finishing Line Press, 2017), and collaborated as poetry editors for Referential Magazine. The New York Times and numerous poetry magazines have printed his work. The recipient of a Pennsylvania Council of the Arts fellowship, he tends a blog at https://insidetheinvisible.wordpress.com/.
Rachael Zubal-Ruggieri
Rachael Zubal-Ruggieri (she/her/hers, they/them/theirs) is a long-time employee at Syracuse University. She is Assistant Editor of Wordgathering: A Journal of Disability Poetry and Literature and Managing Editor for Nine Mile Books & Literary Magazine. She co-created (with Diane R. Wiener) “Cripping” the Comic Con, the first of its kind interdisciplinary and international symposium on disability and popular culture, previously held at SU. At conferences and as a guest lecturer for many years, Rachael has presented on the X-Men comic books, popular culture, and disability rights and identities from her perspective as a Neurodivergent person and as a Mad Queer Crip. Entries in their “Micro Mutant Postcard Project (MMP),” as well as other prose, have been published in Wordgathering. Other MMP entries have been published in Stone of Madness, and are forthcoming in Sabr Tooth Tiger Magazine and the Coin-Operated Press Tea Zine. Their most recent publications include two articles (co-authored with Diane R. Wiener) in the Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies‘ Special Issue, “Cripping Graphic Medicine I: Negotiating Empathy and the Lived Experiences of Disability in and through Comics” (Volume 17, Issue 3), and a forthcoming book chapter (co-authored with Diane R. Wiener) in the Palgrave Handbook of Disability in Comics and Graphic Narratives.