Andrew Leland's work often explores the experience of disability, including his transition from sightedness to blindness — and his quest to learn about blindness as a rich culture all its own.
Why you should listen
Andrew Leland is a writer, audio producer, editor and teacher. His first book,
The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight, is about the world of blindness and his place in it. He's also written for the
New Yorker (about Protactile, a way of communicating through touch),
The New York Times Magazine (about the complexities of acting blind on TV) and other outlets including the
Art in America,
McSweeney's Quarterly and the
San Francisco Chronicle, among others. He has produced audio for a range of entities, including an interview with the DeafBlind poet John Lee Clark for the
New Yorker Radio Hour; a story about disabled astronauts for
Radiolab; and a story about reading technologies for the blind for
99 Percent Invisible. He has also taught nonfiction writing, radio and digital storytelling at Smith College, UMass-Amherst and the University of Missouri.
