Alaina Leary

In the aftermath of my rape, I became an activist for ending rape culture. And I quickly found that even in feminist circles, disability was often left out of the conversation completely.

My sexual assault is the main reason my girlfriend and I didn’t celebrate the love-infested holiday for the first six years of our relationship. Last Valentine’s Day, a month after we celebrated seven years together, was our first time embracing the holiday as our own.

Diverse genre fiction shares a lot in common with diverse literature, in that a lot of the challenges are the same. We still have to ask a lot of questions about who gets to tell what stories, what kinds of books and authors are published, what it means to get it right, and who is on staff at the publishing houses that produce genre fiction.

We think of holidays and big moments first when we think about death. What we don’t talk about are the little moments in between, like surviving Autumn.

When Macey and I planned our engagement photos, I knew I wanted my sparkly, bright lavender cane to be in them.

Halloween can be an autistic person’s worst nightmare with the sensory overload. Yet, I'm autistic and Halloween is my favorite time of year.

When I was in seventh grade, I logged onto my MySpace blog and wrote a short blog post about being gay and afraid to come out to my family and frie