Title: TASH Virtual Book Club Author Chat
Featuring: Karl Williams, Lost In A Desert World: The Autobiography Of Roland Johnson
Date: Tuesday, August 30th
Time: 7:00 – 8:30 PM Eastern Time
Join TASH and author Karl Williams for a virtual book club chat on August 30th. Attendees will hear from the author on working with and writing the autobiography of Roland Johnson. A question and answer segment will follow.
There is no registration for this event. Attendees can sign on to the Abode Classroom 10 minutes before the session. This will leave enough time for attendees to test their settings.
About the Author: Karl Williams has published two books with leaders in the self-advocacy movement; his play, based on one of these, Lost In A Desert World: The Autobiography Of Roland Johnson, premiered in San Diego. Songs from Williams’ six CDs have aired on NBC, Fox, public television, cable, and German TV, as well as on SIRIUS and earth-bound radio stations around the world. www.karlwilliams.com
About the Book: Roland Johnson spent half his childhood at Pennhurst State School and Hospital for the Mentally Retarded, where he was sexually abused and, essentially, enslaved. When he’d won his freedom as a young adult, he spent several years putting his life back together and learning to control the anger his experience at Pennhurst had kindled in him. And then he happened upon the Philadelphia-based group Speaking For Ourselves. He quickly rose to the presidency and, in the spirit of Martin Luther King, Jr., whose career he’d followed and whose death he learned of at Pennhurst, was soon traveling across the US and to Canada and England to speak to other fledgling self-advocacy groups and at conferences of professionals, and to work toward establishing a US national self-advocacy organization.
Originally published after Johnson’s death by Speaking For Ourselves, the group Johnson headed up for much of the 1990s, the book sold out its first small printing. One reviewer called it “. . .a work of pioneering authenticity.” Karl Williams has also written a play of the same title, based on the book.
“Roland Johnson was a friend and a hero of mine. He was a great pioneer of the frontier of human being. Read his book.” – Justin Dart, “Father of the of the ADA” (Americans With Disabilities Act)