You can read more about the ceremony and the students honored in an article by the Des Moines Register’s Kyle Munson.

In the eighth grade, my son, DJ, who is autistic and who uses a text-to-voice synthesizer to communicate, became so distraught while learning about Harriet Tubman and a little Polish boy whom the Germans murdered that he couldn’t continue reading. His breathing was heavy; his eyes had glazed over. His heart pounded in the narrow cage of his chest. In response to his ninth-grade English teacher’s question, “What are your strengths … Read More]]> From Fourth Genre, Vol. 14, No. 1, Spring 2012.

In the eighth grade, my son, DJ, who is autistic and who uses a text-to-voice synthesizer to communicate, became so distraught while learning about Harriet Tubman and a little Polish boy whom the Germans murdered that he couldn’t continue reading. His breathing was heavy; his eyes had glazed over. His heart pounded in the narrow cage of his chest. In response to his ninth-grade English teacher’s question, “What are your strengths as a reader?” he replied, “I feel characters’ feelings.” He then added, “Dread very scary books and wish I took breathing easy mom to class to create more security.”

Read more of “River of Words, Raft of Our Conjoined Neurologies” (PDF).

In his short commentary [2] on a “papal red” painting entitled “Birds would violate airline dapper standards for appearance but the skies sport vivider dayglo colors when it can fly freely and uncensored by mankind” (Biklen 2005: 179), autistic painter Larry Bissonnette imagines a realm of unencumbered artistic activity. “Not allowing people with disabilities their patterns of inspiring art through total freedom of expression,” he reiterates, “is like limiting creativity … Read More]]> From Inflexions 5, “Simondon: Milieu, Techniques, Aesthetics” (March 2012). 184-223.

In his short commentary [2] on a “papal red” painting entitled “Birds would violate airline dapper standards for appearance but the skies sport vivider dayglo colors when it can fly freely and uncensored by mankind” (Biklen 2005: 179), autistic painter Larry Bissonnette imagines a realm of unencumbered artistic activity. “Not allowing people with disabilities their patterns of inspiring art through total freedom of expression,” he reiterates, “is like limiting creativity with censorship” (Biklen 2005: 179). As he notes in another commentary, [3] part of which serves as the essay’s first epigraph, verisimilitude doesn’t interest him; rather, he paints to his senses, and the senses in autism are often especially charged. With tremendous wit he links the “vivider dayglo colors” of the painting’s skies with the birds’ freedom to soar as they wish. There would be a violation of airliner decorum, he contends, if winged restrictions—what he figures as censorship–were in place.

Read more of “Gobs and Gobs of Metaphor: Dynamic Relation and a Classical Autist’s Typed Massage” (PDF).