Emily Rapp Black and Lisa Glatt

Emily Rapp Black and Lisa Glatt met in 2006, and have been writing and thinking together since. They are united as friends and writers by their mutual experiences of loss - of loved ones as well as personal physical abilities, a shared birthday, and their love of truth telling with humor. They are currently working on a book of collaborative lyrical essays - a series of literary conversations -- that explore and unpack the mystery of non-normative embodiment, with all its joys and terrors. This project arose out of the global Covid-19 crisis, and how it has forced the world to examine bodies in a profoundly new way, asking questions with no easy answers, and sometimes no answers at all: how does one assess another's quality of life? What does freedom mean in the context of those already living with the lack of significant physical freedoms? What happens when an unprecedented challenge forces the able to join the disabled inside—what is shelter then, this insular world of walls and halls and ceilings that so many already know too well? What happens when all bodies are in peril and how will our confrontation with that vulnerability motivate us to shift our understanding of community?