Alice Wong knows disabled readers deserve stories by disabled authors that are guided into the world by disabled editors, agents, copy editors, and publicists. There are plenty of YA stories with disabled characters who serve, as she puts it, “as devices for the main character’s redemption or coming-of-age.” Wong, a longtime disability rights activist, knows we can do better.

Disability Visibility (Adapted for Young Adults) (Delacorte, Oct. 26) features 17 of the essays from the 2020 adult collection that she edited, with a new introduction aimed at young readers. It’s not “an A-to-Z, ticking off all the boxes,” Wong tells me in a recent conversation over Zoom from her home in San Francisco. “That’s not the point of this anthology. It’s really digging deep into what people are passionate about, and about their lives, about their work, about their truths. It’s not trying to be all things for all people.”

I ask her what is, to me, the $20,000 question: Who’s the audience she most wants to reach? Wong says she’s thrilled if nondisabled people read the collection, and she’s proud that it’s approachable. But “I don’t center nondisabled people,” she tells me. “I don’t center their expectations.”

Wong is confident that this perspective makes her collection resonate more with both disabled and nondisabled young readers. For readers who are disabled or chronically ill, she stresses the rarity of books speaking directly to their experiences. “If you’re a disabled person reading the introduction, you think, this person’s talking to me!” But because it has avoided all the careworn tropes of inspirational or tragic or healed disabled people, Disability Visibility has also created something more compelling for all readers. “I wanted [it] to be a provocation. Not a violent one but a gentle provocation toward doing better,” she says.

When I ask about her choice not to include authors’ notes or explainers providing context for the pieces, she talks about the possibility that an anthology will excite readers into research and activism. It’s important for readers “to accept the author on their own terms,” she explains. “There’s the opportunity for people to learn more afterward. That’s another sneaky agenda of mine. I want these readers to be superexcited and to be moved and curious and do papers on each author.”

Wong is deeply enthusiastic about the use of the original anthology in college classrooms and looks forward to the YA addition being used similarly. “It’s really been a thrill to talk to teachers, students, people who are giving it to their families. It has the potential to be a really wonderful entry point for a lot of nondisabled people.” Anthologies are powerful, she says, because along with the brevity of individual pieces, there’s “a variety of subjects, a variety of styles. That, to me, goes hand in hand with the diversity. It’s about style, it’s about tone, it’s about subjects, not just the actual author.”

Everything Wong says about the essays intertwines the personal and the political, which are interdependent for her. Among the most crucial criteria in selecting the essays was that she love all the pieces personally. She praises the tenderness of one essay and the joy in another. But she’s also adamant that the collection be “the catalyst to this larger, not-so-subtle, relative politicization. I want them to really wake up.” But the personal and political aren’t in conflict; they feed one another. She sees how individual each of these essays is to the author’s experience: “I want to dig deeper, I want realness, I want power, I want the messiness.”

Perhaps this explains her answer when I ask about how she retains hope in seemingly hopeless times: “my friendships and relationships with others, being in community,” she says. She reminds me that one of the strengths of chronically ill and disabled people is that we often have a “better understanding of slowing down when we need to slow down.” This understanding is something disabled people can bring to the publishing industry, Wong offers. Although she is heartened to see more disabled writers published than ever before, she knows that the work will be superior if there are disabled people everywhere in the editing and publishing process.

Wong is already looking ahead to her next book—a memoir, Year of the Tiger: An Activist’s Life, coming in 2022 from Vintage. It’s clear that the shift from compiling and editing an anthology to writing her own memoir has been fascinating for her. She’s passionate about nonfiction, hers or others’. While fiction can open up young readers’ imaginations, she says, “sometimes nonfiction can do the same thing. Nonfiction can really open our thoughts, too, and open our eyes and our hearts.”

And as for the pieces in this collection? The tender and the angry, the straightforward and the joyful, the political and the activist? “We deserve them,” she says.

Deborah Kaplan is a disabled techie and book reviewer in Massachusetts.