When she was growing up in Lockport, author and disability rights activist Keah Brown didn’t see herself as different just because she has cerebral palsy.
That changed in school one day in her teenage years.
“It really took that one moment in the cafeteria,” Brown said of an interaction with another student. “At that age, I thought that this kid who doesn’t know me was the one telling the truth about me. As an adult, it’s funny to think how much that one moment had power over me.”
As she approached young adulthood, she said that she started to feel uncomfortable in her own skin. She said she began standing in front of her mirror and would say aloud qualities that she liked about herself to help build her self-confidence. One day in 2016, she posted four of her favorite photos of herself on Twitter with the hashtag “disabledandcute.”
“I thought it was going to be (viewed by) five people, max. But by the end of the week, we were viral. By the next week we were global,” she said. “It changed my life.”
The hashtag and her viral fame came around the same time Simon and Schuster published her first book “The Pretty One: On Life, Pop Culture, Disability and Other Reasons to Fall in Love with Me.” Her career has been on the rise ever since.
Brown graduated from SUNY Fredonia State College in 2013 with a bachelor’s degree in journalism. She said at the beginning of her writing career, she was asked to write about only two topics: disability and race, “never anything else.” As a result, she said she began to feel pigeonholed.
“I remember being petrified that the only opportunities I would get were disability-related, even though my love is in pop culture. ‘The Pretty One’ was that opportunity to realize I’m fully a human being,” Brown said. “I had to be really forceful and say I have all these stories I want to tell.”
Brown said she is hoping to show that her experience can be replicated. She was tapped by Marie…
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