The Red Shoes

Although Black’s poems have a multifaceted appeal, her noted influence includes her spearheading the disability poetics movement in which the disabled experience is embodied and rendered with explorations toward agency. As she told Ukrainian American poet Ilya Kaminsky, she was “almost forty before I sort of ‘came out’ as a person with a disability—and [. . .] I think that is also when I began to write with some degree of authenticity” (See: Further Reading & Resources). She notes that, “because disability deals so directly with many of the soft, inchoate, under-exposed parts of being alive in the world, it is a rich ground for thinking about this project of being human in genuinely new ways.”

Black is known for her community building, both in expanding inclusivity through her role at AWP and for starting Zoeglossia, a nonprofit organization that supports poets with disabilities. She has also served as one of the co-editors, with Jennifer Barlett and Michael Northen, of an anthology called Beauty Is A Verb: The New Poetry of Disability (2012), which was one of the first of its kind. Black is quick to credit other disability poets as inspirational, including “Josephine Miles, Vassar Miller, Tom Andrews, Laura Hershey, [and] Larry Eigner,” as well as several newer poets, including Kaminisky and Bartlett.