The One Book One Community Committee is pleased to announce our fall 2023 events! 

Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body, by Rebekah Taussig, is the 2023 campuswide common read. The committee was purposeful in choosing a book on an important topic that would resonate with people all across campus — from students, faculty and staff to the larger local community — and spark meaningful conversations. 

Rebekah's keynote speech will be in the Verizon Ballroom in the Arkansas Union at 6 p.m. on Nov. 8. A luncheon event is scheduled on Nov. 9 at noon in ARKU 512-514.

One Book One Community is collaborating with a number of departments and programs across campus to support conversations around the book and topic. The University of Arkansas Libraries will have copies of the book in various forms — physical, ebook and audiobook. The Razorbook RSO, UREC student employees, the Student Alumni Association and Fulbright staff have the book in their reading circle rotation this fall. A large number of ENGL 1013 Composition I sections also have the book as a part of their curriculum, along with a number of other courses across campus. Over 2,200 students are reading the book this fall!

The Writing Studio is also planning a writing competition for around the time of Rebekah's events. More information will be coming out soon, so keep on the lookout for updates!

If you would like to enter our first book giveaway, please email onebook@uark.edu.

MORE ABOUT REBEKAH TAUSSIG

Rebekah Taussig will challenge everything you think you know about disability as she invites us into her experience of living in a body that looks and moves differently than most. "What would it mean for disabled folks if society saw us as acceptable, equal, valuable parts of the whole?" she writes in her memoir, Sitting Pretty: The View From My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body (HarperOne).

Taussig, who has been paralyzed since the age of three, is a mom, wife, author, disability advocate and educator with a Ph.D in creative nonfiction and disability studies. Before pivoting to writing, speaking and consulting, Taussig taught passionately for almost a decade from freshmen in high school to upper-level college classes and continues to offer writing workshops. She is also one hell of a fighter on a mission to show that disabled people have incredible value; as she argues, a more inclusive world is a sturdier, kinder, more imaginative world for all of us.

A storyteller at heart with a great sense of humor, Taussig invites us to think bigger and more critically about who has a seat at the table and the barriers that bar others from inclusion. She's held talks and workshops at the University of Michigan, Davidson College and Yale University on disability representation, identity and community, and her writing appears in publications from TIME to Refinery29. She's been a guest on a myriad of podcasts and also runs the Instagram platform @sitting_pretty, where she crafts "mini-memoirs" for her more than 50,000 followers to contribute nuance to the collective narratives being told about disability in our culture. Taussig is the recipient of the Hefner Heitz Kansas Book Award in Literary Nonfiction for Sitting Pretty.