Join us for the first in the Public Lecture Series: Representations of Disability in Historical, Scientific and Artistic Perspectives.
On January 21, Kenny Fries, author, poet and Disability Futures Fellow of the Ford Foundation/Mellon Foundation/USA Artists will present “Stumbling over History: Disability and the Holocaust.”
“Unlike the Holocaust, there are no T4 survivors. We know about T4 mainly through medical records and from the perpetrators. Aktion T4 does not have its Elie Wiesel or Primo Levi. This is the main reason I write about what happened to disabled people during the Third Reich. I want to be a vicarious witness. This is my way to bridge the silence, to keep alive something that is too often forgotten.
What kind of society do we want to be? Those of us who live with disabilities are at the forefront of the larger discussion of what constitutes a valued life. What is a life worth living?”
Kenny Fries is the author of In the Province of the Gods (Creative Capital Literature Award); The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin’s Theory (Outstanding Book Award, Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights); and Body, Remember: A Memoir. He edited Staring Back: The Disability Experience from the Inside Out and curated “Queering the Crip, Cripping the Queer,” the first international exhibit on queer/disability history, activism, and culture (Schwules Museum Berlin). His books of poems include In the Gardens of Japan, Desert Walking, and Anesthesia.
His current work-in-progress is Stumbling over History: Disability and the Holocaust, excerpts from which have appeared in The New York Times, The Believer, and Craft, and are the basis for his video series What Happened Here in the Summer of 1940?
Twice a Fulbright Scholar (Japan and Germany), he is a recipient of a Rockefeller Foundation Arts and Literary Arts Fellowship, and was a Creative Arts Fellow of the Japan/US Friendship Commission and the National Endowment for the Arts. He has received grants from the DAAD (German Academic Exchange), Canada Council for the Arts and the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe. He is a Disability Futures Fellow of the Ford Foundation/Mellon Foundation/USA Artists.
