Disability rights activist and author Alice Wong dies at 51

Alice Wong, an activistic and writer who championed the rights of radical with disabilities, has died

SAN FRANCISCO -- Alice Wong, a disablement rights activistic and writer whose independency and penning inspired others, has died. She was 51.

Wong died of an corruption Friday astatine a infirmary successful San Francisco, said Sandy Ho, a adjacent person who has been successful interaction with Wong's family.

Ho called her person a “luminary of the disablement justness movement” who wanted a satellite successful which radical with disabilities, particularly ones of marginalized demographics who were radical of color, LGBTQ and immigrants, could unrecorded freely and person afloat autonomy implicit their lives and decisions.

The girl of Hong Kong immigrants, Wong was calved with muscular dystrophy. She utilized a powered wheelchair and an assistive breathing device.

Ho shared a connection connected societal media that Wong wrote earlier her decease successful which she said she ne'er imagined her trajectory would crook retired arsenic it did, to writing, activism and more.

“It was acknowledgment to friendships and immoderate large teachers who believed successful maine that I was capable to combat my mode retired of miserable situations into a spot wherever I yet felt comfy successful my skin. We request much stories astir america and our culture,” Wong wrote.

She advocated for “getting radical retired of institutions and remaining successful the community,” Ho said and her works — including books she wrote and edited and the Disability Visibility Project blog, which she started — shared her penning and voices and the perspectives of others.

Ho said Wong was a comic idiosyncratic and a hilarious writer, not an casual skill. Her memoir “Year of the Tiger: An Activist's Life” is filled with humorous snippets but besides humanizes disability, she added.

The bequest of Wong's enactment is that radical with disabilities “speak for themselves and that cipher speaks for us,” Ho said.

Wong was among the 2024 people of fellows of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, recipients of the “genius grant.”

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