Hayden M. Knight lives in Los Angeles with his husband Daniel. His work has appeared in Sycamore Review, Passengers Journal, The Coil, Sensitive Content Magazine, and elsewhere. He won the 2018 Luminaire Award from Alternating Current Press and was One Story’s 2025 Adina Talve-Goodman Fellow. He is currently writing his first novel.

Hayden is from central Indiana. He grew up half-deaf, improvising a life between Deaf and hearing worlds with assistive devices, sign language, lipreading, and guesswork. Despite his conflict with language, he writes. His fiction and essays encircle deafness, disability, and homosexuality, explore the intricacies of access and connection, and examine the body as the site of a struggle for power, pleasure, survival, and selfhood. A recurring focus in his work is gaze: surveillance, scrutiny, the dangers of hypervisibility and invisibility, and the difference between being watched and being seen.

He writes as an advocate, too: about the ways disability is still critically misunderstood in culture and media, and about what becomes possible when disability is normalized and disabled people are allowed agency and complexity on the page and in life.

When Hayden isn’t working on stories or novels, he publishes process notes and reflections on disability, queerness, and speculative storytelling in his newsletter Night Rites.

Donald Knight

The name “Knight” is chosen in honor of Donald Frederick Knight, Jr. — an accomplished classical musician, singer, performer, and teacher. He was the life partner of beloved American radio broadcaster Norman Pelligrini. Donald was a family member, close friend, and queer mentor to Hayden, who now uses his name in his memory.