Despite decades of progress in diversity, equity, and inclusion, disability remains a glaring omission in mainstream conversations — including within psychoanalytic and literary communities. Disabled people are too often written about rather than heard from, cast as objects of pity, inspiration, or tragedy rather than as full, complex subjects of their own lives. This New Directions weekend confronts that gap head-on, bringing together disabled writers, disability scholars, and psychoanalytically minded thinkers to challenge the two-dimensional narratives that have long been imposed on disabled experience — from fairy tale curses to “triumph over adversity” memoirs.

But this conference goes deeper than representation. It asks all of us — disabled and nondisabled alike — to examine our own discomfort with difference and physical vulnerability. Drawing on the disability justice movement, emerging memoir, and psychoanalytic theory, Unruly Bodies, Unruly Stories invites participants to reckon with the cultural projections that have made disabled people, in scholar Tom Shakespeare’s words, “dustbins of disavowal.” This is a weekend not just about disability, but about what we cannot bear — and who gets left to carry it.

Weekend Coordinator: Lisa Zimmerman, LCSW-C

Jennifer Natalya Fink is the co-founder/former director of the Disability Studies program at Georgetown University. She is the author of All Our Families: Disability Lineage and the Future of Kinship (Beacon, 2022) and six other award-winning books. She recently completed her certificate in psychoanalytic studies at the Washington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis and is a member of the P-Hole Center for Liberatory Education. Her article “Playing with Autism: Using Play in Psychoanalytic Work with Autistic Adults” was recently published in Psychoanalytic Inquiry. Fink is the winner of the Doctorow Prize for Innovative Fiction and the Dana Award for the Novel. Her writing has been featured in the New York Times and Atlantic. Watch for her new novel, A Mischief coming in 2027, edited by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore for Bunny Presse (an imprint of Fonograph Editions), and a new book on what neurodiversity has to teach us about psychoanalysis and vice versa, tentatively titled Neuropsyches: Neurodiversity, Narrativity, and the New Psychoanalysis. She is a 2024-2027 Fulbright Specialist and the mother of a brilliant autistic young woman.

Amanda Leducis a Canadian writer and disability rights advocate. She is the author of Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space (Coach House Books, 2020), which was shortlisted for the 2020 Governor General’s Award in Nonfiction. Her latest novel, Wild Life (Penguin Random House Canada, 2025), was longlisted for the 2026 Sunburst Award, the 2026 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction and the 2025 Giller Prize. Her earlier novels include The Centaur’s Wife (Penguin Random House Canada, 2021) and The Miracles of Ordinary Men (ECW Press, 2013). She has cerebral palsy and lives in Hamilton, Ontario.

Robert McRuer is Professor of English at the George Washington University, where he teaches disability studies, queer theory, and critical theory more generally. He is the author, most recently, of Disability, Revolution (2026), which appeared in the University of California Press’s American Studies Now series. He is also the author of the award-winning Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability (NYU, 2006) and Crip Times: Disability, Globalization, and Resistance (NYU, 2018), as well as numerous other books and articles.

Lisa Zimmerman, LCSW-C is a psychotherapist with a private practice in Bethesda, MD. She has received training in psychoanalytic psychotherapy from the Washington School of Psychiatry, the Stephen Mitchell Relational Study Center, and the Institute for the Psychoanalytic Study of Subjectivity. She spent two decades working in community mental health, where she specialized in working with people with HIV/AIDS, the LGBT community, and Spanish-speaking immigrants. She graduated from New Directions in 2026 and writes on issues related to disability and internalized ableism. Her work has been published in ROOM: A Sketchbook for Analytic Action, Voices, and Kaleidoscope: Exploring the Experience of Disability Through Literature and the Fine Arts.