Alice Wong was born in the Indianapolis suburbs to parents who had immigrated to the United States from Hong Kong.
She was born with a neuromuscular disorder called spinal muscular atrophy. Wong stopped walking when he was seven or eight years old.
Wong earned a BA in English and sociology from Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis in 1997.
In 2004, she earned a master’s degree in medical sociology from the University of California, San Francisco.
Wong is the founder and Project Coordinator of the Disability Visibility Project (DVP), a project in collaboration with StoryCorps that collects oral histories of people with disabilities in the United States.
The Disability Visibility Project was established prior to the 25th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. As of 2018, the project had collected approximately 140 oral histories.
Wong works on the Disabled Writers project, which is supported by Wong and The Disability Project.
Disabled Writers is a website that assists editors in connecting with disabled writers and journalists.
CripLit in a series of Twitter chats with novelist Nicola Griffith for disabled writers, and CripTheVote is a nonpartisan online movement encouraging disabled people’s political participation. In Narrabase, she discusses her activism.
What disease does Alice Wong have?
Wong was born with spinal muscular atrophy, a condition in which certain nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord die, resulting in progressive weakness and atrophy of muscles in the trunk of the body.
She stopped walking when she was seven or eight years old.
