Meet the Authors: AJ Odasso

For the Meet the Authors series, AJ Odassso talked about herself as a poet and also an autistic writer. She shared how she has worked with her autism in writing and how autism has effected her overall. Odasso has taught courses at the Honors College and currently works as an administrator for the SHAC. Her view on autism and her description on how it effects her were interesting. For her it is important that autism, and all its forms, should be made aware to the public. She has written for a magazine which has articles written by autistic people often talking about their life with autism. Odasso has made sure to understand her struggles with autism and work through them just as any other person would. Although some of these struggles can be 'ordinary' things for people without autism it is important to think about what one might have to deal with for something considered 'ordinary'.
As an author she talked about different experiences that were influential to her work. The first major event she mentioned was when she studied abroad. Studying abroad in England for her opened her up to different cultures. Being raised in western Pennsylvania, she had minimal diversity in the cultures she was exposed to. Seeing how in York where she was studying that the pubs she visited had nights where local poets could read their poems in front of a casual audience. The difference in simply the attention to poetry between York and Pennsylvania was massive for Odasso. She saw how poetry wasn't the daunting form that her teachers said it was and began to appreciate it and wrote from there. Another moment that influenced her work was when she almost drowned as a child. She recalled that when she went to the beach when she was about nine years old, she got too far out into the water and a wave swept her under the water. Although the same wave pulled her toward shore quickly, the experience has had an effect on her writing. She has incorporated a 'drowning' aspect into many of her poems and has looked into underwater themes in her writings. Whether an event is traumatic or joyous, they may have intense changes to how you view the world.