Jen Deerinwater

Senior Advisor to Disability Culture Lab | Just Jen

Jen Deerinwater is a bisexual, two-spirit, multiply-disabled citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and an award-winning journalist and organizer who covers the myriad issues Jen's communities face with an intersectional lens. Jen is the Founding Executive Director of Crushing Colonialism and a 2019 New Economies Reporting Project and a 2020 Disability Futures Fellow. 

Jen is a contributor to Truthout and Jen's work has been featured in a wide range of publications, including Bitch, Rewire.News, and New Now Next. Jen’s writing is included in the anthologies Disability Visibility: First Person Stories from the Twenty First Century, We Organize to Change Everything: Fighting for Abortion Access and Reproductive Justice, Property Will Cost Us the Earth: Direct Action and the Future of the Global Climate Movement, and Crip Authorship: Disability as Method. Jen is also hard at work on two books, including Sacred and Subversive, a 2LGBTQIA+ anthology on faith and spirituality.

Jen has been interviewed for numerous outlets on Jen’s work and The Advocate named Jen a 2019 Champion of Pride. Jen is also a 2022 member of the Susan M. Daniels Disability Mentoring Hall of Fame.

Jen currently serves on the HIV Epidemic Among Urban Natives Community Advisory Board with Johns Hopkins University and Native American Lifelines and is a board member of the Disabled Journalist Association. While a nomad at heart and raised in rural areas of her nation’s reservation in Oklahoma and rural Texas, Jen currently lives on occupied Piscataway land known as Washington D.C.