2:00 pm, ET
11:00 am, PT
Navigating Publishing as a Writer with a Disability
& Creating Mentorship for Deaf and Disabled Writers Information Session
Wednesday, September 24, 2025
11:00 am PDT / 12:00 pm MDT, CST / 1:00 pm CDT / 2:00 pm EDT / 3:00 pm ADT / 3:30 pm NDT
90 minutes
Zoom Webinar
ASL Interpretation, live captions, and audio transcript available
Free Registration
Join our panel featuring Dr. Keiko Honda, Miranda Newman, and Léa Taranto as they explore the obstacles, roadblocks, and ableism they have encountered navigating the Canadian book publishing landscape. The discussions will also include allyship and how all writers can support Deaf and disabled writers. Moderated by Conyer Clayton, this webinar runs approximately 90 minutes including a Q&A period and an information session for our new mentorship program Creating Mentorship for Deaf and Disabled Writers. A recording of the session will be available until the application due date.
This session is hosted as a Zoom webinar. ASL interpretation, live captions, and audio transcript will be available. When registering, please let us know if you have additional accommodations or any barriers we can remove to make this webinar more accessible for you, and we will do our best to meet your needs.
Dr. Keiko Honda, a former cancer epidemiologist, transformed a life-altering illness into a mission. After a rare autoimmune disease led to wheelchair use at age forty, she founded the Vancouver Arts Colloquium Society (VACS) in 2014. Awarded the City of Vancouver's Remarkable Women Award (2014) and the King Charles III Coronation Medal (2025), Keiko champions intergenerational connections and empowers marginalized voices through art. Her inspiring journey is captured in her memoirs, Accidental Blooms (2023), Hidden Flowers (2025), and The Broken Map Home (2025).
Miranda Newman is a best-selling author. Her debut memoir-in-essays, Rough Magic (McClelland & Stewart, 2024), a collection about living with borderline personality disorder, won a 2025 Silver Nautilus Award and was a finalist for the 2025 Balcones Prize for Nonfiction. Miranda’s work has appeared in The Globe and Mail, Chatelaine, Broadview Magazine, The Walrus, and more. Miranda mentors writers with lived experience with the support of Yale University and The Writers’ Union of Canada.
Léa Taranto is a disabled Chinese Jewish Canadian writer who lives with OCD and comorbid disorders. Her debut novel, A Drop in the Ocean, is based on an adolescence in inpatient treatment. An MFA graduate of the University of British Columbia, alumnus of Simon Fraser University Writer's Studio, and member of PRISM International’s poetry board, she resides on traditional, unceded Halkomelem and Squamish territories in BC.
Conyer Clayton is a queer writer and editor from Louisville, Kentucky living in Ottawa. A MacDowell Fellow, Tin House Novel Summer Scholar, and author of two award-winning poetry collections and ten chapbooks, their third full-length collection of poetry, the lake-shaped excuse, is forthcoming in fall 2026 with Wolsak and Wynn. Conyer's fiction and poetry often explores grief, illness, and gender-based violence through a surrealist lens. Photo: Curtis Perry.
