Chloé Cooper Jones on Leaving the Neutral Room

“I can’t ever not be disabled, and I can’t ever present to another person as not disabled. So if I’m acting as though that part of me—the extremely important, real, intricate part of me—doesn’t exist, then everybody around me knows I’m not being very authentic.”

Chloé Cooper Jones is a writer based in New York City. In 2020, Chloé was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in Feature Writing for “Fearing for His Life,” a profile of Ramsey Orta, the man who filmed the killing of Eric Garner. She was the recipient of the 2020 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant and the 2021 Howard Foundation Grant from Brown University. Both grants were in support of her debut memoir, Easy Beauty. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.