A specialist in creative writing and disability studies, Georgina Kleege received her B.A. from Yale and has been at Berkeley since 2003. She specializes in creative nonfiction, disability autobiography, and blindness and visual art. She teaches courses in creative writing and disability studies. Her readings and presentations take her to universities and art museums across the United States and Canada, most recently to the “Art Beyond Sight Conference” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Six of her essays have been cited as “notable essays” in The Best American Essays series, in six different years. Among her works are the books Blind Rage: Letters to Helen Keller (Gallaudet University Press, 2006), Sight Unseen (Yale University Press, 1999), and the novel Home for the Summer (Post-Apollo Press, 1989).
“[Blind Rage]is utterly absorbing, both in its graceful renditions of particular days in Keller's life and in the author's self-analysis along the way. Kleege is a gifted writer—her description of Keller's final day is wondrous. This book has a cumulative power, and the reader—whether or not already familiar with Keller's life—will become deeply moved,” says Margaret Heilbrun in the September 2006 Library Journal. Arthur Danto in the April 1999 issue of The New Republic calls Sight Unseen “a provocative book, gracefully written and morally urgent,” while F. Gonzalez-Crussi (Commonweal, August 1999) says that the writing is “impeccable, elegantly sparing prose.”