All locations will open late at 10:30 a.m. Thursday, February 6, due to staff training.
March 29 – May 23, 2025
Celebrate the joys and challenges of physical, human existence through Rebekah Taussig’s memoir Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary, Resilient, Disabled Body. Join programming across the Library to explore what a radically inclusive world can look like.
Lifelong Kansas Citian Rebekah Taussig is a writer, educator, and disability advocate. Taussig holds a Ph.D. in English, focused on creative nonfiction and disability studies. She runs the Instagram account @sitting_pretty, writes for her Substack This Too, and co-produces the weekly podcast Scratch That. Taussig’s new children’s book is We Are the Scrappy Ones (April 1, 2025). Her first book, Sitting Pretty: The View From My ordinary Resilient Disabled Body, was published in 2020.
Rebekah Taussig lost the use of her legs as a toddler after cancer treatments but writes that she continued sleeping on the top bunk; her family carried on as usual and she kept pace. But it didn’t seem that the world was keeping pace with her.
Sitting Pretty is made up of eight essays largely about the shifts in Taussig’s self-perception and relationship with the world around her. She tells stories of both awkward and beautiful interactions with strangers and friends, what went through her mind, and how she responded.
“We all live in bodies with limitations and points of access.”
“We often think of our bodies in really distinct categories - disabled and not disabled. And that there’s a big chasm between those groups of people,” Taussig says. “A lot of what I am playing with and trying to show in the book is that we all live in bodies with limitations and points of access. This is something that we all should be thinking about, and not just in a dreadful way but in a way that allows us to imagine more for each other.”
“This is something that we all should be thinking about, and not just in a dreadful way but in a way that allows us to imagine more for each other.”
Big Read 2025 is supported in part by The National Endowment for the Arts Big Read, the City of Kansas City, Missouri Neighborhood Tourist Development Fund, and the Estelle S. and Robert A. Long Ellis Foundation.
NEA Big Read is a program of the National Endowment for the Arts in partnership with Arts Midwest.
El Proyecto NEA Big Read es una iniciativa del National Endowment for the Arts (el Fondo Nacional para las Artes de Estados Unidos) en cooperacion con Arts Midwest.
