The Disability Studies Lecture Series at Cal State San Bernardino will host its first event of the 2024-25 academic year at 1 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 15, featuring Cyrée Jarelle Johnson, a poet and the 2024 Ford Foundation Disability Futures Fellow.

The talk is free and open to the public. Sign up online at “In Conversation with Poet, Cyrée Jarelle Johnson.”

Johnson, from Piscataway, N.J., is the author of “SLINGSHOT,” developed with support by Astraea Foundation’s Global Arts Fund Culture/Strike Climate Change and Environmental Justice Fellowship and the Rewire News Disabled Writers Fellowship, and winner of a 2020 Lambda Literary Award in Gay Poetry. 

“WATCHNIGHT,” his second collection of poetry, received the 2023 James Laughlin Award. He was a 2023 National Endowment of the Arts Creative Writing Fellow, the inaugural Poet-in-Residence at the Brooklyn Public Library, and a 2020 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow. He earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University. Johnson is currently finishing a novel called “Male Girlfriend.”

The CSUSB Disability Studies Lecture Series started in the spring 2024 semester with five events that highlighted the expansive and interdisciplinary world of Disability Studies. The organizers’ aim “is to increase disability literacy in our communities and to enrich our own scholarship, creativity, and activism by engaging with new ideas in disability theory, history, culture, and the arts,” according to the series webpage.

The series organizers include CSUSB professors Jessica Luck, Tiffany Jones, Jess Nerren, Jonathan Hall and Jeremy Murray. This year, the series is supported by a grant from Accelerate InSoCal and The Cog Neurodiversity Space.

Upcoming events will feature disability studies scholars Brian McGowan (Federal Institute of Technology Zurich), Lissa Ramirez-Stapleton and more. Visit the Disability Studies Lecture Series webpage for links to past events and updates on coming talks.