Welcome to
Listen to Our Stories:
Words, Pictures, and Songs by Young People with Disabilities

compiled and edited by Linda Hillyer

Now you can listen to Listen to Our Stories! Click here for details.

These pages offer you the opportunity to step into the lives of some thirty young adults and children with disabilities. Here you will find poetry, essays, interviews, songs, journal writing, letters, and pictures; each tells a story about something essential — some kernel of meaning — in its young author’s life.

Contributors to this anthology include young people — girls, boys, young women, and young men — between the ages of five and twenty-one. They come from around the country and as far away as Indonesia and Bangladesh. They have widely varied backgrounds, interests, and talents and an enormous range of disabilities. Here is a partial list of the disabilities represented (for a more complete list, go to the Index of Disabilities page).

How to Navigate This Website

You can learn about the “why” and the “how” of this project by going to the Introduction, written by the anthology’s compiler and editor, Linda Hillyer. To find out who the people are behind this project, go to the Acknowledgments page.

You have three ways to get to the individual stories in this collection:

• You can go to the Table of Contents, which functions as a “site map.” It provides links to all sections and pages, including the young people’s stories. The stories are listed here by title.
  
• You also have the option of locating a story by the author’s type of disability. You can do this by going to the Index of Disabilities and identifying the disabilities you are interested in.
  
• Your third option is to simply click on Part One, Part Two, Part Three, or Part Four on the menu bar. This will bring you to the title page of the part you have chosen, where you will find brief descriptions of, and links to, the stories in that part.

All visual artwork has been described for readers with visual impairments. To access the descriptions, click on the links below the images.

Finally, for links to other disability-related sites, go to the Resource Links page.