Elsa Sjunneson Quotes

American Deafblind author, editor and media critic

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Elsa Sjunneson is an award-winning Deafblind author, editor, historian, media critic, and speaker living in Seattle. Her work includes the forthcoming Dear Blind Lady: Disability Advice You Didn't Know You Needed (Sasquatch Books, October 6, 2026), the Washington State Book Award-winning memoir Being Seen, and Assassin's Creed Valhalla: Sword of the White Horse. She has won three Hugo Awards, an Aurora Award, and a British Fantasy Award for editorial work, and her nonfiction has appeared in venues including CNN, Tor.com, and The Boston Globe.

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So diagnosis capitalism is the idea, but fundamentally capitalism benefits from giving people diagnoses. Because you make money on people having labels.

We need more disabled creators in the media, but it is the viewer's responsibility to think through what they are seeing and not just aimlessly consume. It is their job to ask questions and go to the source. Start by asking, 'Have I ever actually talked to a blind person?'

It is the absence of disabled women that is killing us.

If the only disabled person you've ever seen is actually a non-disabled person pretending to be disabled, your perception of disability is going to be terrible.

On the absence of disabled people from the world

I would be yet another blank spot in the world that should have been.

My life is pretty ordinary unless you think I couldn't be this person.

Every single piece of work I do is about forcing my way through the door.

I do think that hearing from her is important. By letting the mythology of William Gibson be the only record that we teach kids, we’re letting a man tell us what a woman’s life was like, and not just any man, we’re talking about a non disabled man.

We are not all like Helen Keller! I'm so tired of that question!

She knew she had a voice and a platform. It’s not like she didn’t know that when she wrote for The New Republic. She knew that people listened to her, and she made a decision to throw a different type of disability under the bus. And that’s not really something that I can say was okay.

That's the trap with memoirs, you have to be honest no matter how uncomfortable it makes you!

Productivity is a pernicious lie and the way that it attacks us in terms of being able to rest, in terms of being able to take care of our bodies, is a major component of why disability is so affected by the capitalist model.

On raising a Deaf, blind, or Deafblind child

It is always possible to give them every adaptive support and still not have them miss out on the childhood you expected for them if they were non-disabled.

Ableism is how non-disabled people make the world unsafe for disabled people.

I've always come into rooms with a force, and I've always been the kind of person who doesn't take no for an answer if there's an injustice to be dealt with.