Caution: some plot spoilers ahead. Don’t read if you plan on watching Black Sand! Each item in Mark Wood’s ever-expanding repertoire of ASL films is better than the last. However, he continues to stick with his tried-and-true formula for making crowd-pleasing suspenseful thrillers. As in “Wrong Game” and “Legend of the Mountain Man,” Wood’s films feature a group of Deaf people vacationing in a strange house, preferably surrounded by many [...]

In DC, is there a place you can go where everyone knows your name in sign? (Okay, sorry for the lame attempt at trying to re-create the spirit of the theme song from “Cheers” … Where everybody knows your name, and they’re always glad you came. You wanna be where you can see, our troubles are all the same. You wanna be where everybody knows your name… ) I’ve got [...]

My good friend, Rachel Knopf, gave me “the unheard: a memoir of deafness and africa” (words in the title uncapitalized in respect to how it was printed on the cover of the book) by Josh Swiller for a birthday present a few weeks ago. When I pulled the book out of the gift bag, I knew immediately what it was. The book was about a man, born deaf but raised [...]