Dr. Sunaura Taylor  will present a talk about her book Disabled Ecologies: Lessons from a Wounded Desert as part of the State of Arizona Research Library’s 2025 Arizona Author Series. The talk is at 12 p.m. MST, Thursday, January 23rd, and will be held virtually on Zoom. Attendees are encouraged to register to receive the link to the presentation. After the talk, there will be time for questions from the audience.

This presentation will be recorded and made available on our YouTube channel. Registered attendees will receive a link to the recording once it is available. 

About Disabled Ecologies: Once a landscape becomes polluted, the expectation is to force the polluting entity to pay for the destruction they unleashed. Yet, the land, waterways, wildlife, and people are forever altered for generations. Taylor takes readers to a Superfund site in Tucson to learn about the long-term implications of living in such a contaminated place. This new altered and fractured landscape becomes a disabled ecology that requires reframing how nature and people survive and, hopefully, thrive.

You can read and listen to books about the history and culture of Arizona for free on Reading Arizona.

Dr. Sunaura Taylor is an artist and writer. She is the author of "Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation" (The New Press, 2017), which received the 2018 American Book Award. Taylor has written for a range of popular media outlets and her artworks have been exhibited widely both nationally and internationally. She works at the intersection of disability studies, environmental justice, multispecies studies, and art practice. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at the University of California, Berkeley. Her latest book is "Disabled Ecologies: Lessons from a Wounded Desert" (University of California Press, 2024). She lives in the Bay Area with her daughter Leonora, husband David, and their two cats, Rosie and Pirate.

This event is part of the 2025 Arizona Author Series. This program is supported by the Arizona State Library, Archives & Public Records, a division of the Secretary of State, with federal funds from the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

Arizona Center for the Book, a Library of Congress Center for the Book Affiliate.