2024 - 2025: Alice Wong
Alice Wong
Alice Wong is a disabled activist, writer, media maker, and consultant. She is the founder and director of the Disability Visibility Project, an online community dedicated to creating, sharing, and amplifying disability media and culture.
“I never intended to be an activist. But my life has always been political. I cannot escape it. I have lived this every day ever since I was a child who had to grow up fast, a child of immigrants advocating for herself to teachers and doctors. When I became older and understood white supremacy, ableism, and structural oppression, I realized the fight was not just for myself but for everyone marginalized and devalued by institutions, systems, and practices. It is the epitome of privilege when people say they are non-political. One only has to see how COVID minimizes and misinformation gaslights people with long COVID and renders high-risk marginalized people disposable as we approach the fourth year of this never-ending plague. My recent near-death experience reaffirmed how fragile everything is. I dream of a day when I can just be and it would be enough. I wish for all disabled people the choice of becoming an activist rather than being forced to as a means of survival.”
Recognized for her service to the community and activism at the local and US-national level, Alice has received the following awards:
- Beacon Award by the San Francisco Mayor’s Disability Council (2010)
- Disability Service Award by the University of California, San Francisco(2011)
- AAPD Paul G. Hearne Leadership Award (2016), an award for emerging leaders with disabilities who exemplify leadership, advocacy, and dedication to the broader cross-disability community.
She is widely published and her activism and work have been featured in international media. Named in 2020 as one of Time Magazine's 16 people fighting for equality in Americ,a she was also named changemaker in 2021 by Marie Claire magazine.
Alice Wong has recently been named one of the 2024 Macarthur Foundation fellows, often known as "genius grant recipients."
Alice is the editor of Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century (Vintage Books, 2020), an anthology by disabled people. Her memoir, Year of the Tiger: An Activist’s Life (Vintage Books, 2022) won the Creative Nonfiction category of the 42nd Annual Northern California Book Awards. Her new book is Disability Intimacy: Essays on Love, Care and Desire (Vintage, April 30, 2024), an anthology about the relationships, communities, and intimacies of disabled people. She is currently working on a forthcoming book Disability Vulnerability (Vintage Books, 2026), an anthology of writing that explores the precarity of life in the disabled community, focusing on the COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing fallout.