Alaina Leary

We think of holidays and big moments first when we think about death. What we don’t talk about are the little moments in between, like surviving Autumn.

Halloween can be an autistic person’s worst nightmare with the sensory overload. Yet, I'm autistic and Halloween is my favorite time of year.

When I was in seventh grade, I logged onto my MySpace blog and wrote a short blog post about being gay and afraid to come out to my family and frie

The best part about Halloween is having free rein to dress a little whimsically and spooky all month long. Let's all dress like every day is Halloween!

I have a lifetime of momless moments ahead of me, but I’ve prepared for those since her death. What I hadn’t prepared for was that I’d have to celebrate one of those milestones on a day that I typically spend in mourning.

Some people would say my bangs make me look younger and I should grow them out, but I disagree. My bangs don’t magically change my appearance, but my forehead feels naked without them.

Moving can be a traumatic experience. We often forget how many remnants of the past we hold onto—whether intentionally or accidentally, just because we put a letter away in a drawer and forgot about it.

My sexual assault is the main reason my girlfriend and I didn’t celebrate the love-infested holiday for the first six years of our relationship. Last Valentine’s Day, a month after we celebrated seven years together, was our first time embracing the holiday as our own.

In the aftermath of my rape, I became an activist for ending rape culture. And I quickly found that even in feminist circles, disability was often left out of the conversation completely.

Diverse genre fiction shares a lot in common with diverse literature, in that a lot of the challenges are the same. We still have to ask a lot of questions about who gets to tell what stories, what kinds of books and authors are published, what it means to get it right, and who is on staff at the publishing houses that produce genre fiction.