How I Became a Human Being

Mark O’Brien was the subject of the 1997 Academy Award–winning documentary Breathing Lessons. He was a published poet and cofounder of the Lemonade Factory, a California press that published poetry by people with disabilities. O’Brien died in 1999 at the age of forty-nine after completing a draft of How I Became a Human Being. Gillian Kendall is a writer. She has contributed to both Outright Radio and Sun Magazine; one of her short stories appeared in The Student Body, also published by the University of Wisconsin Press.