Propel Disability Poetry is a new series published by Nine Mile Books in Syracuse, New York. On February 10, 2025, poet and author Steve Kuusisto, Propel’s senior editor, convened the following discussion over Zoom with five authors with new or forthcoming books in the series. The transcript has been edited slightly for flow.
Steve Kuusisto
We’ve been given an opportunity by The Writer’s Chronicle, the official magazine of AWP, to do a kind of informal collective discussion about the Propel series and the upcoming book publications, and I think it’s a wonderful opportunity for us to just get the word out about your books and us and what we’re doing. And I sort of jumped at this. Of course, you know how these things work, right? Can you do this immediately, and you know, you’ve got eight seconds. And so if you don’t feel prepared for this, just trust me, I don’t feel really prepared for it either, but I’m counting on us as poets and thinkers to have a good conversation, because that’s what we do anyway. And [Nine Mile managing editor] Rachael can edit out all of the moments where we say things like . . . “Is iota really the eleventh letter of the Greek alphabet?” I don’t remember. We count on Rachael.