Articulate: A Deaf Memoir of Voice

In this impressive debut, Kolb reflects on being deaf in a hearing world. Born in 1990, the same year the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed, Kolb writes firsthand about the successes and shortcomings of its attempts to bridge accessibility gaps in American life. She grew up in New Mexico with hearing parents and a hearing sister, and attended the New Mexico School for the Deaf’s preschool in Albuquerque before being shunted to public school in first grade, which led her to cherish “those hazy days at the preschool where everyone had known how to sign.” As Kolb charts her journey to Stanford, then Oxford as a Rhodes scholar and Emory University as a PhD candidate, she goes deep on the methods of communication that aided her, mixing cultural histories of American Sign Language, lipreading, and finger spelling—including an account of attempts to ban ASL in U.S. schools for deaf students by so-called “oralists”—with personal anecdotes about the practices. Along the way, Kolb chronicles the stigma, both obvious and subtle, that deaf people endure from hearing individuals and their deaf peers alike. (In one scene, her classmates decry an acquaintance’s cochlear implants: “Where’s your Deaf pride?”) Accessible, fascinating, and heartfelt, this thorough examination of contemporary Deafness moves and edifies in equal measure. It’s required reading. Agent: Lydia Wills, Lydia Wills LLC. (Sept.)