Crip Ideas and Crip Futures

I find myself writing this introduction in the midst of pandemic conditions, and it could not be clearer why we need crip voices now more than ever. In so many ways, this need, this urgency is precisely what motivated me to take on the work of an editor at The Deaf Poets Society. Disability-run publications are necessary spaces for community building, celebration, and collective thinking. I am grateful to have had this space held for me when I first began writing about disability and to have continued holding this space for new writers who continue to teach me about what disability is and can be.

Over three years later, I am signing off as the editor of the Ideas section, which has hosted interviews, essays, and reviews of disability scholarship, performances, and literature. This decision has not been easy, but I have been processing immense losses to our editorial staff and ongoing fiscal and organizational challenges that make this work difficult for me to continue doing sustainably. I recognize too that this is an opportunity for new editors to potentially step into this role and for new publications to continue the work we’ve begun here. I am indebted to Tim Dalton for inviting me to this team and believing in my capacity to elevate new voices in our community. Much love and gratitude to the editorial team, past and present, who kept this journal alive even in the toughest times.

For all the people who have contributed to this journal, who have read and listened to the pieces here, who have believed in the work we do, who have invested in each of us, I can never express my thanks enough. It is to you that I dedicate this section, and for you that I pursued this work. It is also all of you who will create new collectives, imagine better, crip futures.

—Travis Chi Wing Lau
Austin, Texas; April 18th, 2020