A cartoon of the author

[image description: A cartoon version of a white transmasculine person with short dark hair, wearing a brown t-shirt with a rainbow logo that reads “Autistic Badass Brigade” and glasses, standing and holding up a small Lady Frieda Harris painting of Mercury, messenger of the gods. Photo copyright 2019, Maxfield Sparrow]

I’m Maxfield Sparrow, multiply disabled writer and gardener manqué.

I am Autistic.  I facilitate closed and open peer support groups for Autistic adults, through AANE. You are not alone.

I also have EDS, N24, CAPD, ADHD, and a lot of other letters and numbers.

Some things I’ve written/edited:

I edited an anthology, Spectrums: Autistic Transgender People in Their Own Words (Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2020).

I wrote The ABCs of Autism Acceptance (Autonomous Press, 2016) while traveling. It is an exploration of neurodiversity, acceptance, and Autistic culture in 26 chapters.

My memoir collection , No You Don’t: Essays From an Unstrange Mind (Unstrange Publications, 2013), is currently out of print.

Maxfield Sparrow with Mister Kitty

[image description: Maxfield Sparrow is hugging Fermat the Wonder Cat (a.k.a. Mister Kitty), a black and white tuxedo cat. The image is black and white. Photo copyright Maxfield Sparrow, 2018.]

In addition to my own books, my work appears in the following anthologies:

I have written free-lance for publications like NOS Magazine, The Thinking Person’s Guide to Autism, and Rooted in Rights. For most of 2019 I was a consulting producer on a project featuring Autistic artists: Outside the Lines, a click story on Autistic views of Independence, from National Geographic. I also wrote the introductory text in the click story.

I spent a few years in Colorado, working on an MFA in creative writing and poetics at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. Like most, I’m working on a novel.

A photo of Max in a blue plaid shirt and grey beanie

Max looks to one side at the setting sun. The light illuminates their hazel eyes. Max has an unruly goatee shot through with grey, the shadow of a wispy mustache, a dark grey beanie, and a dark blue and white plaid button down shirt. (Aries season, 2024)

I am also an artist and a composer / noise maker.  I’ve spent nine years and counting, traveling the U.S. in a minivan with Fermat the Wonder Cat, my chosen accommodation for disability and poverty. The isolation has been healing. Like a scalpel.

These days I’m in another phase of life transition, attending to several storage units scattered across the country. I’ll be paring down my stuff and hopscotching my possessions cross-country, now that I’ve figured out where I want to settle and deepen my enwilderment.

So, for 2025, I am again nomadic. I’m grasshoppering my library and instruments from everywhere to the desert, living the great adventure of preparing  for the next great adventure.