Eli Clare

Clare was a visiting scholar at the University at Buffalo's Center for Diversity Innovation for the 2020–2021 academic year. He is also on the advisory board for the Disability Project, housed under the Transgender Law Center, the largest national trans-led organization.

Clare has received a number of awards for his work, including the Creating Change Award from the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and LGBT Artist of the Year from Michigan Pride. In 2018, Clare received the Richard L. Schlegel Award for visionary LGBTQ leadership from American University. That year, his book Brilliant Imperfection won the Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction from Publishing Triangle. In 2019, he was awarded a Disability Futures Fellowship by the Ford Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure was published by Duke University Press in 2017. In 2018, Brilliant Imperfection won the Publishing Triangle's Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction.

The Marrow's Telling: Words in Motion is a collection of poetry published by Homofactus Press in 2007, though many of the poems had been previously published. The collection was a Lambda Literary Award finalist in 2007.

Queer Crips: Disabled Gay Men and Their Stories is a collection of personal stories from gay men with disabilities edited by Bob Guter and John R. Killacky. To this anthology, Eli Clare submitted "Gawking, Gaping, Staring." The book won the 2004 Lambda Literary Award for the Anthologies/Non-fiction category.

Eli Clare coordinated a rape prevention program, and helped organize the first Queerness and Disability Conference in 2002.

He has written two books of creative non-fiction, Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation (1999, 2009, 2015), Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure (2017); a collection of poetry, The Marrow's Telling: Words in Motion (2007); and has been published in many periodicals and anthologies.

Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation is an autobiographical collection of essays first published by South End Press in 1999 and 2009 and republished by Duke University Press in 2015. Exile and Pride's expanded edition, published in 2009, was a finalist for Foreword's 2009 INDIES Book of the Year Award. The 2015 edition includes a foreword by Aurora Levins Morales and an afterword by Dean Spade.

Eli Clare (born 1963) is an American writer, activist, educator, and speaker. His work focuses on queer, transgender, and disability issues. Clare was one of the first scholars to popularize the bodymind concept.

Clare was born in Coos Bay in 1963 and grew up in Port Orford, Oregon. He attended Reed College before transferring to Mills College where he received a degree in women's studies in 1985. Clare earned an M.F.A. degree in creative writing from Goddard College in 1993.