Biography
Presenting In the Dreaming: New Futures, Rethinking Disability
Litia Perta (she/her) is a writer, teacher, creative collaborator, and workshop facilitator. Everything she does is underpinned by her role as a parent (a forever caregiver) which shapes the lenses through which she sees the world. Most of her life has been tangled up with academic institutions and she has learned experientially that the “care” they promise (in the form of compensated time for creative work and pedagogy) involves a compromise of physical and emotional wellbeing that, starting in 2020, she was no longer willing or able to make. Since then, she has been divesting from the institutions which trouble her to instead place her energy, intelligence, and time on supporting historically marginalized artists and other outliers who evolve collective wisdom by centering care and interdependence not as weakness but as integral to survival, abundance. Her recent manuscript tracks life with her queer family on a small, remote island off the grid in western WA and their relocation back to Los Angeles—to Altadena—just weeks before the fires. Her book weaves through My Own Private Idaho, Harriet Tubman, Sinéad O’Connor, and Saint Brigid to examine what consciousness is from the perspective of a person parenting in apocalypse with one of the rarest neurological conditions on earth.