The people that rock

David James “DJ” Savarese (he/him) works to disrupt ableism as an artful activist, public speaker and scholar, multi-genre writer, teacher and practicing optimist. Co-Chair of The Alliance, he designed and facilitates the Lives-in-Progress Collective, a national, multi-generational, cross- disability-led project focused on health equity, wellness, and expanding and transforming self- direction.

A 2022-23 Iowa Arts Fellow and Zoeglossia Fellow, he is the author of Swoon, containing three poems nominated for Pushcart Prizes. He has also published Studies in Brotherly Love, a co-authored chapbook based on the artwork of minimally speaking autist Malcolm Corley, and A Doorknob for the Eye, a poetic series focused on the artwork of 7 autistics.

Co-producer, narrative commentator, and subject of the Peabody Award-winning, Emmy-nominated documentary film Deej: Inclusion Shouldn’t Be a Lottery (2017), he teaches inclusive, multigenerational, global poetry writing classes and poetry writing courses for alternatively communicating autistics.

An advocate for the communication and literacy-based educational rights of all students, he was a 2017-2019 Open Society Foundations Human Rights Initiative Community Youth Fellow. A Pushcart Prize nominee and a notable essay in Best American Essays (2018), his lyric essay “Passive Plants” disrupts the
cultural assumptions underlying communication and movement biases. As a public scholar, he teaches and presents nationally on a range of topics, including an NEH-sponsored talk on “Disrupting Ableism Through Artful Activism.” His published scholarship includes but is not limited to “Disrupting the Garden Wall”; the co-authored essay “Enmeshing Selves, Words and Media, or Two Life Writers in One Family Talk about Art and Disability”; an essay on his embodied experience, “Coming to My Senses,” “Unearthing the Concepts That Bury Us,” a chapter in the scholarly anthology Disability in Dialogue, and forthcoming essays on multimodal creativity and his multisensory lived experience. One of only two AAC-using American autistics to be fully included from kindergarten through college graduation, he has been actively disrupting the status quo since he was five years old.

Before moving to Iowa City, DJ graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a double major in Anthropology and Creative Writing from Oberlin College in 2017.

Anita Cameron (she/her/hers) began working as Not Dead Yet’s Director of Minority Outreach in January 2017. She has met with national and state policy makers and written persuasively about opposition to a public policy of assisted suicide from the perspective of communities of color who experience disparities in access to healthcare.

From 2004-2006, she worked at the American Association of People with Disabilities (AAPD) in Washington, DC, as the DC Metro Disability Vote Organizer, working with the Board of Elections and Ethics to increase voting access and get disabled people to serve as poll workers and election judges.

Anita worked as Systems Advocate for the Center for Disability Rights in Rochester, NY, from 2006-2010, addressing a broad range of disability rights and access issues with advocates and lawmakers at the local, state and national levels.

In 2004, while in Washington, DC, Anita trained to become a CERT (Community Emergency Response Team) member. In 2008, she helped to form the first CERT class consisting of people with disabilities in Rochester, New York. After joining Denver CERT in 2011, Anita became the first visually impaired CERT instructor for the State of Colorado, and in 2013, became a CERT Program Manager for the State. She has assisted in numerous exercises and real-world incidents with Denver CERT, including serving as a radio communications operator during the Colorado Flood of 2013 and remotely assisting survivors of Hurricanes Harvey and Irma in disaster relief in 2017. Anita has written extensively, for numerous agencies and publications, on emergency and disaster preparedness for people with disabilities, as well as the role and participation of the disability community in emergency management.

Since 1986, Anita has volunteered with ADAPT, a national, grassroots disability rights organization. In 34 years of involvement, she has risen to a position of national leadership and has been arrested 139 times for nonviolent civil disobedience fighting for the civil rights of all disabled folks. She was invited to the White House on two occasions, has met three sitting U.S. Presidents and two Vice-Presidents, helped to organize a national march, and was published in “Voices of A People’s History of the United States”, by the late, award-winning historian, Howard Zinn.

As a Black Disabled Lesbian, Anita has dealt with racism, sexism, ableism, and homophobia – sometimes combinations of these. She has used her experience of discrimination and her unique intersectional perspective to promote understanding among different groups of disenfranchised people and increase social justice among those fighting for social justice. She worked to get nondiscrimination ordinances for the LGBTQIA2S+ community in Chicago, IL and Denver, CO. She helped organize the first Pride March in Colorado Springs, Colorado and served as the national representative for the disability community at the 1993 March on Washington.

In 2017, the Autistic Self Advocacy Network honored Anita with the 2017 Service to the Self Advocacy Movement award for her national advocacy work, and in 2018, Anita received the Lead On award for her work with ADAPT.

Anita also serves on the National Disability Leadership Alliance’s Steering Committee, as well as it’s Racism Taskforce, and co-Chaired the Intersectional Justice Committee for ADAPT.

She holds a degree in Biology from University of Illinois at Chicago Circle and a degree in Computer Information Systems from Community College of Denver.

Anita lives in Rochester, New York, with her wife, Lisa, and cats, JoJo and Nemo.

Amanda is currently an associate professor of Human Services at York College of Pennsylvania where she teaches course work related to direct practice, administration and public policy impacting human service organizations. She is the director of the Institute for Social Healing. Her work is rooted in the belief that human services have the potential to help make our communities more inclusive, diverse, fairer and stronger. She has a master’s degree in Applied Behavior Analysis and Special Education from the Teacher’s College at Columbia University and a doctoral degree in Human Development and Family Studies from the University of Delaware. Amanda got introduced to the field of human services and disability supports through her families’ advocacy with and for her uncle, who has developmental disabilities. She formally began her career in therapeutic recreation and has worked as a direct support professional, personal care attendant, program manager and special education teacher. Currently her professional work focuses on the structural challenges faced by marginalized families, strategies they use to fight for change, community-based and citizen directed support services, trauma-informed support systems, self-compassion and the development of the human service workforce. Amanda recently has published a book entitled Standing Together and Finding a Voice Apart: Advocating for Intellectual Disability Rights.

Marian works to support the rights of all people, promoting inclusion, and coproducing sustainable support systems alongside people with disabilities, their families and allies. She has worked in direct support of people as well as a group home supervisor, service director, supports broker and executive director. These experiences have enabled her to collaborate with, and learn from people with disabilities and their families, and to apply those lessons across teams, organizations and systems. Marian serves as CEO of Values Into Action, a growing network of organizations she created with her husband, Paul Saulino in 2005. The organizations offer supports and services to people exclusively in their own homes and communities and partner with people, their families and other chosen allies to design, deliver and evaluate services. A leader in participant/self-directed system, Marian leads efforts to expand the scale and scope of services led by people themselves, with the support they identify and define. Marian currently serves as the Board Chair of the Collaborative for Citizen Directed Supports-New Jersey, a cause-based membership association, that like the Alliance, is dedicated to upholding the principles of self-agency and determination. She holds an MSW from Temple University, with a specialization in social administration and planning.

Ly Xīnzhèn M. Zhǎngsūn Brown, J.D. is an internationally recognized advocate, organizer, attorney, strategist, scholar, and writer whose work addresses interpersonal, corporate, and state violence targeting disabled people at intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, faith, language, and nation. Ly Xīnzhèn has designed and taught disability studies courses at multiple universities over the past decade and led public policy research, analysis, and advocacy work for several disability community organizations over the past two decades. They were the youngest person to ever serve as a state developmental disabilities council chairperson and have advised numerous cities, counties, states, nations, and international bodies on disability-related topics. Ly Xīnzhèn founded The Autistic People of Color Fund and maintains several free community resources including a job board, an anticarceral mental health collection, a community calendar of disability-related workshops and other events, and a living archive of the Judge Rotenburg Center’s abuse of disabled people. They previously practices special education civil rights law and led the only policy and research project focused on disability, AI, and algorithmic harm.

Lateef McLeod is building his career as a writer and a scholar. He has earned a BA in English from UC Berkeley and an MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College. He is four years into the Anthropology and Social Change Doctoral program at California Institute for Integral Studies in San Francisco. He published his first poetry book entitled A Declaration of A Body Of Love in 2010 chronicling his life as a Black man with a disability and tackling various topics on family, dating, religion, spirituality, his national heritage and sexuality.

He currently is writing a novel tentatively entitled The Third Eye Is Crying. He also published another poetry book entitled Whispers of Krip Love, Shouts of Krip Revolution in 2020. He was in the 2007 and 2016 annual theater performances of Sins Invalid and also their artist-in-residence performance in 2011 entitled Residence Alien. In 2019 he started a podcast entitled Black Disabled Men Talk with co-hosts Leroy Moore, Keith Jones, and Ottis Smith. The podcast website is www.Blackdisabledmentalk.com. More of his writings are available on his website LateefhMcLeod.com and his Huffington Post blog. Some of his community service work includes being the co-chair of the Persons with Disabilities Ministry at Allen Temple Baptist Church and being the vice president of the Leadership committee and executive board member of the International Society for Augmentative and Alternative Communication.

jamie Ray-Leonetti is the Associate Director of Policy, responsible for coordinating all policy-related activities for the Institute on Disabilities at Temple University.

She also works on other grants and contracts related to public policy, such as the implementation of the CMS Final Rule for Home and Community-based Services, and the Person-Directed Services project. Before joining the Institute, Jamie spent the first 20 years of her professional career advocating for individuals with disabilities throughout Pennsylvania. She has a BA in Humanities from York College of Pennsylvania and a JD from Temple University School of Law.

In her spare time, Jamie enjoys singing with the Philly Pops Festival Chorus, a 170 voice, auditioned, all volunteer group of singers from Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

She also enjoys traveling with her husband Frank. Jamie is a volunteer with the National MS Society and Lawyers Concerned for Lawyers Pennsylvania.

Jamie identifies as a proud member of the disability community.

Priya Penner is a 22 year-old multiply-disabled queer activist of color, with grassroots organizing experience on the local, state, and national levels. Hailing from snowy Upstate NY, Priya joined the Partnership for Inclusive Disaster Strategies in June of 2020 to help ensure those in marginalized communities, especially those who are multiply-marginalized, are heard within the disaster relief field.

Priya learned about disability pride and disability rights at a very young age from her disabled adopted mother. She spent several years using her knowledge of the Independent Living philosophy to organize on the grassroots level with national disability rights organization, ADAPT, as well as on the local collegiate level. She also worked at a local Center for Independent Living (CIL) fight for the freedom of all persons with disabilities.

In her nonexistent free time, Priya loves to go on car trips with her fiancée, play with her two cats, and yell obscenities at her TV when playing video games.