Williams, Jeremy & Williams, Gracie, Just Like the Dogwood. Second Annual First Person Literacy Lecture. Presented at the 8th Symposium on Literacy and Disabilities. Research Triangle Park, NC, February 5, 1999 http://www.gac.edu/~dkoppenh/dogwood.html

This is a transcript of Jeremy Williams’s “First Person Literacy Lecture” from the 1999 Symposium on Literacy and Disabilities. Jeremy is a young adult with Down syndrome, who describes his educational and literacy journey in this paper. He is an accomplished Special Olympian, a public speaker in some demand, and a Kennedy family scholar (having read and continuing to read everything he can find anywhere about the family). Jeremy began learning to write as an adolescent in high school. He uses writing as a form of thinking aloud on paper in his journal and as a form of communication in letters and notes with his mother, his family, and others. Gracie has spent a long and productive career as a speech-language pathologist, and augmentative communication (AAC) specialist, and assistive technology specialist in North Carolina, and now South Carolina. She has been instrumental in advancing the provision of AAC services to school-aged children in North Carolina and in establishing and maintaining the North Carolina Augmentative Communication Association as one of the best-organized and most active AAC state organization. Jeremy and Gracie agreed to share Jeremy's literacy and education journey at the 8th Symposium on Literacy and Disabilities.