Alaina Leary

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

Why can't I be vulnerable as an adult? Despite my fears of vulnerability, some part of me knew it was the key to having fulfilling intimate relationships.

I’ve walked the line between visibly and invisibly disabled my entire life.

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.

September, for the first time in many years, wasn’t the start of any new beginnings. I’ve been in some form of school — general education in public schools, then an undergraduate degree, and then a graduate degree — since I was in preschool.

"Writing about trauma or difficult experiences doesn’t repair that trauma,” said Melanie. “It doesn’t make it go away. But I kept hearing what a transformative thing it was for [the memoirists] to shape these stories into something that they could be proud of.”

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.

Remembering to do things isn’t exactly my strong suit, so I need to actively plan so that my partner isn’t the only one making lists, cleaning the dishes, and checking that our bills are paid on time.

I’ve been told by LGBTQ+ community members and cis straight folks that my identity isn’t real. I’m guessing they've either never seen my Top 10 Hot List (hint: it features all genders) or watched me Instagram stalk my favorite semi-celebrity crushes, because I am crushing hard on men, women, and nonbinary people.

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.