Rachel Kolb at Harvard Book Store presenting
Articulate: A Deaf Memoir of Voice in conversation with Rachel Berman-Kobylarz
This event will feature American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation.
Date Monday, September 22, 2025
Time: 7:00pm
Location
Harvard Book Store
Address: 1256 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02138
Telephone: (617) 661-1515
Toll Free telephone:(800) 542-READ
Ticket This event is free; no tickets are required.
Harvard Book Store welcomes Rachel Kolb—the first signing deaf Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, recipient of a PhD in English literature from Emory University, graduate of Stanford University, and a recent junior fellow in the Society of Fellows at Harvard University—for a discussion of her debut memoir Articulate: A Deaf Memoir of Voice. She will be joined in conversation by Rachel Berman-Kobylarz—a Deaf educator and artist with over 16 years of experience teaching American Sign Language at the college level, and Principal Lecturer and Curriculum Coordinator at Northeastern University.
This event will feature American Sign Language (ASL) in interpretation
About Articulate
A deaf writer’s exploration of language, communication, and what it means to be articulate—and her journey to reclaim her voice.
Rachel Kolb was born profoundly deaf the same year that the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed, and she grew up as part of the first generation of deaf people with legal rights to accessibility services. Still, from a young age, she contorted herself to expectations set by a world that prioritizes hearing people. So even while she found clarity and meaning in American Sign Language (ASL) and written literature, she learned to speak through speech therapy and to piece together missing sounds through lipreading and an eventual cochlear implant. Now, in Articulate, Kolb blends personal narrative with commentary to explore the different layers of deafness, language, and voice. She tells the story of how, over time, she came to realize that clear or articulate self-expression isn’t just a static pinnacle to reach, a set of words to pronounce correctly, but rather a living and breathing process that happens between individual human beings. In chronicling her own voice and the many ways she’s come to understand it, Kolb illuminates the stakes and complexities of finding mutual and reciprocal forms of communication.Part memoir, part cultural exploration, Articulate details a life lived among words in varied sensory forms and considers why and how those words matter. Told through rich storytelling, analysis, and humor, this is a linguistic coming-of-age in both Deaf and hearing worlds, challenging us to consider how language expresses our humanity—and offering more ways we might exist together.