68-Year-Old Susan Nussbaum, Pressing for Disability Rights in Her Plays

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After working in theater for decades, he turned to fiction. His novel Good Kings Bad Kings, which follows residents working at a Chicago care facility and is acclaimed for its candor and sensitivity, won the 2012 PEN/Bellwether Award for Social Interactive Fiction.

Where did the title of the book come from? reporting In The New York Times, Jonathan Carey is about an autistic child murdered by an employee of the Oswald D. Heck Developmental Center near Albany, where Jonathan lives. “I can be a good king or a bad king,” the man said to the boy as he strangled himself, according to court documents.

That word remained with Miss Nussbaum, he said in 2013. interview Via the Bitch Media website. “This title got it because it reminded me that when it comes to kids, adults have all the power. And when the adult in question has no emotional attachment to the child and the child’s welfare is handed over to that adult—as in institutions—terrible things can happen.”

He continued: “Disabled characters presented to us often fit one or more of these stereotypes: victim, villain, saint, beast. The fate of the crippled character is often a miraculous cure, death, or institutionalization.”

While writing the novel, Nussbaum, as in her other work, states, “It was really important to me to get the characters with multiple disabilities to have their own voices and the agency to represent them and their own perspectives on what happened. ”

Susan Ruth Nussbaum was born on December 2, 1953, in Chicago, to Mike and Annette (Brenner) Nussbaum. His mother worked in public relations. She grew up in Highland Park, a suburb of Chicago, and attended Highland Park High School, graduating in 1972.

After running in TV series with his father, who was interested in theater from an early age, he started writing plays during his high school years. After graduation, she took drama classes at the Goodman School of Drama (now the School of Drama at DePaul University) in Chicago.

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