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Associate Professor
A poet, translator, essayist, and critic, Ralph James Savarese is the author of Reasonable People: A Memoir of Autism and Adoption (Other Press 2007), which Newsweek described as a "real life love story and an urgent manifesto for the rights of people with neurological disabilities." In its first month of publication, Reasonable People was chosen "book of the month" by the Autism Acceptance Project in Toronto, CA, and it won the 2008 Independent Publishers Gold Medal in the category of Health/Medicine/Nutrition. His poems, essays, articles, translations, and opinion pieces have appeared, among other places, in American Poetry Review, Sewanee Review, Southwest Review, Southern Poetry Review, Seneca Review, Southern Humanities Review, Edge City Review, New England Review, Graham House Review, Flyway, Cream City Review, Another Chicago Magazine, For New Orleans and Other Poems, Stone Canoe, Rattle, Segue, Beloit Poetry Journal, Poet Lore, The Poker, Modern Poetry In Translation, Poetry In
ternational, Prose Studies, Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, Autism Perspectives, Politics & Culture, Disability Studies Quarterly, the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability, the New York Times, the LA Times, the Baltimore Sun, the Atlanta Constitution Journal, the Houston Chronicle, the Dallas Morning News, the Cincinnati Post, the Huffington Post, the Gainesville Sun, and the Des Moines Register. He has appeared on CNN's "Anderson Cooper 360," WNBC in New York, NECN in Boston, NPR's "The Diane Rehm Show," and Iowa Public Radio's "The Exchange" and "Live at Prairie Lights." Reasonable People was also one of several books about autism featured on ABC's "Nightly News with Charles Gibson." Savarese is the 2003 winner of the Hennig Cohen Prize from the Herman Melville Society for his article "Nervous Wrecks and Ginger-Nuts: Bartleby at a Standstill," and he received a "notable essay" designation in the
Best American Essays series of 2004 for his piece "Severe and Profound." Recently he was nominated for a Pushcart Prize for "The Lobes of Autobiography: Poetry & Autism." That essay was one of two finalists for the Donald Murray Award for the best essay about writing from the National Council for the Teachers of English. His current projects include editing a special issue of Disability Studies Quarterly with his wife, Emily Thornton Savarese, on autism and the concept of neurodiversity. Appearing in January 2010, the collection boasts some thirty-seven contributors, half on the spectrum, and it advances a difference model as a way of understanding this neurological condition. He is also editing a special issue of the literary journal Seneca Review with Stephen Kuusisto entitled "The Lyrical Body." It is scheduled to be published in the spring of 2010. Finally, he is co-editing a collection of essays called Papa PhD: Men in the Academy Write About Fatherhood. In addition to th
ese editing projects, he is working on a book about neuropoetics and another about Melville and disability. He teaches American literature, creative writing, and disability studies at Grinnell.
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