When he lost his sight as a result of a violent beating in 2007, Belo Cipriani of St. Louis Park, Minn., a suburb of Minneapolis, all of a sudden found himself thrust into a scary new world he didn’t know how to navigate. At the age of 26, he had to start his life over again.

“One of the first steps I took in my recovery was to seek insight into my situation,” he said. “I started looking for disability stories that were contemporary in nature.”

He didn’t really find anything that fit the bill, so he did the next best thing. “I started turning to people and places that could offer support,” he said. That support eventually led him to pursue a Master’s in Creative Writing, and start a new career as a disability journalist. 

“Right away when I started working, I began meeting other disabled writers and asked them questions about how they were navigating life,” he said. Their answers are among those featured in the debut title for Oleb Books, a new publishing company Cipriani started up that will exclusively publish writers with disabilities. 

The company’s debut title, Firsts: Coming of Age Stories by People with Disabilities, is scheduled for release the week of Oct. 01, 2018. It is a collection of eleven essays Cipriani edited that showcase what it’s like to live with a disability. 

Support Our Advertisers

Included in the collection are “The Hearing Child” by Kevin Souhrada, who writes about what it’s like to be a second-generation deaf man. In his essay, Souhrada shares intimate details about how he communicates with the world around him, about the modification made to help him interact with the hearing world, and of the trials and tribulations associated with parenting his hearing children. 

Also included in the book is “Dark Clouds,” by Nigel David Kelley. In his essay, Kelley shares how being diagnosed with a slow growing, but debilitating brain tumor helped him discover the important things in life; and in “Heart in a Bottle,” Christina Pieres shares how difficult it is to overcome the assumptions and stereotypes people have about those living with autism. 

Some of the writers were born with their disabilities. The majority, like Cipriani, developed them later in life. “A common thread in a lot of the stories is that many of the writers were the first person with a disability to do a certain thing,” said Cipriani. 

Souhrada, for example, was the first deaf child in his community to play t-ball for the local team; the first deaf middle school football player; and the first deaf man in the nation to take the national Spanish Exam. Another common theme shared by many of the writers, they had a second “Coming of Age” as a result of their disability. 

“There’s a sense that once you’re disabled your life is over, or it’s less rich. I don’t think that’s the case. All of these people lead very rich lives. They are falling in love, they are getting work, they are moving around. Yes, they have experienced tragedy, but they are learning to manage it,” said Cipriani, who hopes the book will serve as a reminder to others that life may not be perfect, but it is manageable. 

“Great books touch our minds, hearts and take us to undiscovered lands. But for far too long, literary works have failed to capture the disability experience. I’m hoping to change that through Oleb Books,” said Cipriani.

In her review of the book, Amy Silverman, a commentator on KJZZ Radio, the NPR member station in Phoenix, Ariz., and the author of “My Heart Can’t Even Believe It: A Story of Science, Love and Down Syndrome,” said, “I feel like I was given a ring of keys, and that each one allowed me to enter a different world. Each narrator is unique, each world fascinating -- at turns heartbreaking, funny and hopeful -- and yes, disability is center stage but it’s not the only thing that makes these characters jump off the page. Far from it. This is a beautifully written collection of stories about obsession, art, work, family, love, loss. It’s about the things that make us different -- and the things that make us the same.”