Visions Toward Success Video: An Interview with Author Andrew Leland

Centered around career exploration through storytelling, Vision Towards Success highlights work stories and lived experience of members of the blind/low vision community. This show presents awareness of disability identity across the employment landscape as a resource for both employees and employers to embrace the disabled experience as a valuable contribution to workplace culture. Through interviewing professionals across a wide variety of occupations, we aim to educate and increase understanding and demonstrate the value of diversity.

The second of two interviews conducted by Victoria and Olivia Leger—with the guidance of Videographer Cam Adibi in the summer of 2021 as part of their MCB internship with the Trades Win project team—featured author Andrew Leland. Andrew is a writer, audio producer, editor, and teacher living in Western Massachusetts. He is currently writing a book about the world of blindness for Penguin Press. He has written about the complexities of acting blind on TV (and in his own life) for the New York Times Magazine. His writing has also appeared in the New York Review Daily, McSweeney’s Quarterly, the San Francisco Chronicle, BOMB magazine, the catalog for the 2014 Whitney Biennial, and elsewhere.

From 2013–2019, Andrew hosted and produced the Organist, an arts-and-culture podcast, for KCRW. He has produced audio for a range of entities, including a story about reading technologies for the blind for 99 Percent Invisible. He has taught nonfiction writing, radio, and “digital storytelling” at Smith College, UMass-Amherst, and the University of Missouri. He has been an editor at the Believer since 2003, and he has edited books for McSweeney’s and Chronicle Books. You can reach Andrew Leland at aleland [at] gmail.com.

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