About

Headshot of Rachel Kolb: a smiling white woman with shoulder-length blonde hair sits in front of a blurred background with tree branches and grass. She is wearing a bold red turtleneck.

Rachel Kolb is a writer whose work explores communication, language, and disability as central components of human experience. A graduate of Stanford University, she was the first signing deaf Rhodes scholar at Oxford before receiving her Ph.D. in English literature from Emory University and then completing a junior fellowship in the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. Her work has been published in The New York Times and The Atlantic, among other venues, and she is the author of the new memoir Articulate (Ecco, 2025).

In her free time, Rachel enjoys the outdoors, long conversations, pleasure reading, travel, museums, new fun facts, and spicy food.

Selected links to essays, multimedia projects, and other publications are available through this site.

 All photos on this website: (c) Josephine Sittenfeld