Alice Wong, the author and community activist who brought a fierce and uncompromising voice to disability activism, has died at 51, NPR reports.

Wong, an Indianapolis native, was born with spinal muscular atrophy, a rare disorder that caused her to use a wheelchair for most of her life. She was educated at Indiana University—Purdue University Indianapolis and the University of California, San Francisco, and worked at the latter school as a research associate for more than a decade.

In 2014, she founded the Disability Visibility Project, an online community that compiles narratives of people with disabilities in conjunction with the nonprofit group StoryCorps, and champions and amplifies disabled culture. She received a MacArthur Fellowship last year; the MacArthur Foundation praised her for "increasing the political and cultural visibility of people with disabilities and catalyzing broader understandings of disability.”

She edited the 2020 anthology Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories From the Twenty-First Century and its 2021 adaptation for young adults. In 2022, Vintage published her memoir, Year of the Tiger: An Activist’s Life; in a starred review, a critic for Kirkus called the book “a stunningly innovative, compulsively readable hybrid of memoir, cultural criticism, and social activism.”

In a 2021 interview with Kirkus, Wong talked about her intended audience for her books, saying, “I don’t center nondisabled people. I don’t center their expectations.”

On her account on the social media platform X, Wong’s friend Sandy Ho posted a posthumous statement from Wong, reading in part, “Hi everyone, it looks like I ran out of time….I’m honored to be your ancestor and believe disabled oracles like us will light the way to the future. Don’t let the bastards grind you down. I love you all.”

Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.