About Elsa
Elsa Sjunneson is an award winning Deafblind author and editor living in Seattle, Washington. Her fiction and nonfiction writing has been praised as “eloquence and activism in lockstep” and has been published in dozens of venues around the world. In 2022 her book, Being Seen won the Washington State Book Award for biography and memoir. She has been a Hugo Award finalist nine times, and has won three Hugo awards, an Aurora Award, and and a BFA award for her editorial work. When she isn't writing, Sjunneson works to dismantle structural ableism and rebuild community support for disabled people everywhere. Her work includes her debut memoir Being Seen: One Deafblind Woman's Fight to End Ableism, her Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla novel Sword of the White Horse, and her episode for Radiolab “The Helen Keller Exorcism.”
A white woman with short hair and an occluded cataract on her right eye wearing purple hearing aids and a pearl necklace, looking with raised eyebrows at camera between trees.
Photo credit: Lis Mitchell, 2021.
A white woman with short hair and an occluded cataract on her right eye holding a cane and wearing purple hearing aids, leather vest, pearl necklace, and striped button-down top, looking with raised eyebrows at camera.
Photo credit: Lis Mitchell, 2021.
A white woman in profile with short hair wearing purple hearing aids, leather vest, pearl necklace, and striped button-down top, looking into distance with Seattle skyline behind her. The light of the sunset gleams in her glasses.
Photo credit: Lis Mitchell, 2021.
About Her Book
Cover image of Being Seen: One Deafblind Woman’s Fight to End Ableism by Elsa Sjunneson. From the letter “I” in “BEING,” the color of Elsa’s cataract refracts in a rainbow-colored prismatic effect over a dark background. “Deafblind” is emphasized with light.
A deafblind writer and professor explores how the misrepresentation of disability in books, movies, and TV harms both the disabled community and everyone else.
As a deafblind woman with partial vision in one eye and bilateral hearing aids, Elsa Sjunneson lives at the crossroads of blindness and sight, hearing and deafness—much to the confusion of the world around her. While she cannot see well enough to operate without a guide dog or cane, she can see enough to know when someone is reacting to the visible signs of her blindness and can hear when they’re whispering behind her back. And she certainly knows how wrong our one-size-fits-all definitions of disability can be.
As a media studies professor, she’s also seen the full range of blind and deaf portrayals on film, and here she deconstructs their impact, following common tropes through horror, romance, and everything in between. Part memoir, part cultural criticism, part history of the deafblind experience, Being Seen explores how our cultural concept of disability is more myth than fact, and the damage it does to us all.
Praise for Being Seen
“A much-needed wake-up call for the nondisabled world.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Sharp and thought-provoking memoir… As she writes, ‘nondisabled people, buckle up.’”
—Booklist Starred Review
“Being Seen is a sharp, necessary book. Sjunneson's clarity of thought and entertaining prose illuminate her life and our world. A powerful and resonant reading experience.”
—Kat Howard, Alex Award-winning author of An Unkindness of Magicians
“Engaging, unflinching, and at times intentionally uncomfortable, Being Seen is a call to action cleverly disguised as a book.”
—Marieke Nijkamp, bestselling author and editor of Unbroken: 13 Stories Starring Disabled Teens.
“With sharpened words aimed squarely at a cultural image that marginalizes disabled women, Elsa Sjunneson is an emerging icon. Being Seen is her unkindest cut; sparing no one from the frank truth of her life as a Deafblind woman and filleting the intersections of identity with her trademark incisive logic and vulnerable memoir. This book will leave scars.”
—Meg Elison, author of Big Girl
“A riotous blend of memoir and cultural criticism that defies expectations on nearly every page. Being Seen persuasively argues that it is not only the disabled body that must adapt to the world, but also the world that must adapt around the disabled body.”
—M. Leona Godin, author of There Plant Eyes: A Personal and Cultural History of Blindness
“A blend of memoir, media criticism, and cultural critique, Being Seen is both vulnerable and bold. It covers Sjunneson’s particular experiences of everything from sword-fighting to protesting, and looks to media to trace the ways the images of disability in America often stand in stark contrast to lived experience. Most importantly, it is a challenge: an unflinching demand for representation, accessibility and justice.”
—Katie Booth, Author of The Invention of Miracles
For media inquiries on BEING SEEN, please contact snarkbatassistant@gmail.com