ALT Graphic with photo of Mickey Rowe. Text reading, Pennsylvania Department of Education Conference. Keynote Spotlight.

ALT Transcription: Fearlessly Different: An Autistic Actor’s Journey to Broadway’s Biggest Stage Mickey Rowe. Rowman & Littlefield, $24.95 (192p) ISBN 978-1-5381-6312-2 In this immensely inspiring debut, Rowe recounts how he achieved his acting dreams “because of and not in spite of my autism.” He writes of his difficult childhood, having grown up with a neglectful mother, younger brothers who bullied him, and a school system that failed to make accommodations for his disability. When his grandmother introduced him to Seattle Children’s Theatre, a young Rowe found solace in watching the “human, wise, and flawed characters” before him. While this led him down an arduous path to finding a career on the stage—one riddled with prejudice from directors and “rejection after gaslit rejection”—he finally found success as the first openly autistic actor to play the autistic lead as Christopher Boone in a 2017 Indiana production of the Broadway hit, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.