Hyperlexia is a syndrome characterized by a child's precocious ability to read. It was initially identified by Norman E. Silberberg and Margaret C. Silberberg (1967), who defined it as the precocious ability to read words without prior training in learning to read, typically before the age of five. They indicated that children with hyperlexia have a significantly higher word-decoding ability than their reading comprehension levels. Children with hyperlexia also present with an intense fascination for written material at a very early age.
Mary Temple Grandin is an American academic and animal behaviorist. She is a prominent proponent for the humane treatment of livestock for slaughter and the author of more than 60 scientific papers on animal behavior. Grandin is a consultant to the livestock industry, where she offers advice on animal behavior, and is also an autism spokesperson.
Bruno Bettelheim was an Austrian-born psychologist, scholar, public intellectual and writer who spent most of his academic and clinical career in the United States. An early writer on autism, Bettelheim's work focused on the education of emotionally disturbed children, as well as Freudian psychology more generally. In the U.S., he later gained a position as professor at the University of Chicago and director of the Sonia Shankman Orthogenic School for Disturbed Children, and after 1973 taught at Stanford University.
Wendy Wasserstein was an American playwright. She was an Andrew Dickson White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University. She received the Tony Award for Best Play and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1989 for her play The Heidi Chronicles.
Janet R. Maslin is an American journalist, best known as a film and literary critic for The New York Times. She served as a Times film critic from 1977 to 1999 and as a book critic from 2000 to 2015. In 2000, Maslin helped found the Jacob Burns Film Center in Pleasantville, New York. She is president of its board of directors.
Autism Every Day is a 2006 documentary film sponsored by Autism Speaks, and produced by Lauren Thierry, Jim Watkins and Eric Solomon. It follows mothers with severely autistic children and consists mainly of interviews with the mothers.
Richard Martin Gilman was an American drama and literary critic.
Jennifer Elder is an American author and assistant editor for the Collins Library of McSweeney's publishing house.
Donna Levin is a San Francisco-based author, editor and writing teacher. She has published the novels Extraordinary Means, California Street, There’s More Than One Way Home and He Could Be Another Bill Gates.
Clara Claiborne Park was an American college English teacher and author who was best known for her writings about her experiences raising her autistic daughter, the artist Jessica Park. Her 1967 book, The Siege was credited as one of the first books to allay the blame that parents, especially mothers, were made to feel at having caused their child's autism through their cold detachment.
Parul Sehgal is an American literary critic. She is a former senior editor and columnist at The New York Times Book Review, and in 2017 became one of its team of book critics. As of December 2021, she had left to become a staff writer at The New Yorker. She also teaches in the graduate creative writing program at New York University.
Autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) or autism spectrum conditions (ASCs) describe a range of conditions classified as neurodevelopmental disorders in the DSM-5, used by the American Psychiatric Association. As with many neurodivergent people and conditions, the popular image of autistic people and autism itself is often based on inaccurate media representations. Additionally, media about autism may promote pseudoscience such as vaccine denial or facilitated communication.
The Reason I Jump: One Boy's Voice from the Silence of Autism is a biography attributed to Naoki Higashida, a nonverbal autistic person from Japan. It was first published in Japan in 2007. The English translation, by Keiko Yoshida and her husband, English author David Mitchell, was published in 2013.
Sonia Taitz is an American author, essayist and playwright. She has written for The New York Times, as a columnist at the New York Observer, and served as contributing editor for Child, a New York Times publication. Her books include Mothering Heights, the novels In The King's Arms and Down Under, and a literary memoir, The Watchmaker's Daughter.
The Rosie Project is a 2013 Australian novel by Australian novelist Graeme Simsion. The novel centres on genetics professor Don Tillman, who struggles to have serious relationships with women. With a friend's help, he devises a questionnaire to assess the suitability of female partners. His plans are set off course when he meets Rosie, who does not fit many of Tillman's criteria, but becomes a big part of his life. The work was first published on 30 January 2013 in Australia by Text Publishing and the rights have since been sold in over 40 other countries. International sales are in excess of 3.5 million copies and the book was named Book of the Year for 2014 by the Australian Book Industry Association. In the United States the novel was published through Simon & Schuster and in the United Kingdom through Penguin Books.
Jennifer Cook (formerly O'Toole) (born October 24, 1975) is an American author and speaker. She is known for her six Asperkids books, which have been translated into six languages and include the winner of the Autism Society of America's Book of the Year Award. Her memoir Autism in Heels: The Untold Story of a Female Life on the Spectrum is a Wall Street Journal Bestseller, a "Best Book" title winner by Publishers Weekly, and named a "Best Memoir" and one of both the "Best Autism Books of All Time" and "Best-Selling Autism Books of All Time" by BookAuthority. She is the on-camera autism expert in Netflix's series "Love on the Spectrum US."
Alison Singer is the president of the Autism Science Foundation (ASF). She has also served on the IACC. She was formerly an executive vice president of Autism Speaks and as a vice president at NBC.
Current research indicates that autistic people have higher rates of LGBT identities and feelings than the general population. A variety of explanations for this have been proposed; The Lancet's "Commission on the future of care and clinical research in autism" commented that it "might be part of a different concept of self, less reliance on or reference to social norms, or part of a neurodiverse lived experience of the world."
Sam is a literary fiction novel by Allegra Goodman. It was published in the United States by Dial Press on January 3, 2023.
