Alice Wong

Alice Wong launched the Disability Visibility Project in 2014 as a one-year push to record disabled people's oral histories with StoryCorps. It outgrew that plan and became a podcast, a blog and a small publishing operation. Born in Indianapolis in March 1974 to parents from Hong Kong, she used a power chair and a ventilator, lived in San Francisco, sat on the National Council on Disability under President Obama from 2013 to 2015, and in 2015 attended a White House event by telepresence robot. Vintage published Year of the Tiger: An Activist's Life in 2022. It is a mosaic rather than a straight chronology: essays, interviews, photographs, commissioned artwork, old school assignments and lists, gathered around the zodiac year of her birth. She also edited the anthologies Disability Visibility (2020) and Disability Intimacy (2024), and a MacArthur Fellowship came in 2024. She died on 14 November 2025, aged 51.