Stephen Kuusisto

Stephen Kuusisto is an American poet.

Stephen Kuusisto was born in Exeter, New Hampshire in March 1955 where he spent most of his childhood. His father worked as a professor of government at the University of New Hampshire and wanted to study the Cold War, so he moved his family to Helsinki, Finland, from 1958 to 1960. Later in 1963, his father took a job working for New York’s governor, Nelson Rockefeller, to improve the state’s university system, so the Kuusisto family moved to Albany, New York. He was born three months premature, along with his identical twin brother, who died at one day old. Kuusisto’s blindness is a result of a condition called “retinopathy of pre-maturity,” where the eyes’ retinas do not fully develop in the third trimester of pregnancy. As a result, his retinas were permanently scarred, so he could only “see colors and torn geometries”. There were numerous complications because of ROP: nystagmus, also known as, “darting eyes” when the eyes cannot focus, and strabismus or “crossed eyes.” At five years old, he underwent multiple eye surgeries to correct his crossed eyes. Kuusisto says that during this recovery “is when [he] learn[ed] to hear,” which influenced his 2006 memoir, Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening. Kuusisto also has a photographic memory.

In rural New Hampshire in the 50s and 60s, he was categorized alongside World War II veterans, as he went unnoticed in society. Additionally, there was no information available during Kuusisto’s childhood and adolescence on how to raise blind children. Instead, Kuusisto was taught to “disavow [his blindness]” and attempt to “live like other children” through his kaleidoscope lens. Kuusisto’s mother had to “fight with the local district to gain [him] admission to an ordinary first-grade classroom,” since it would be “another thirty years before people with disabilities are guaranteed their civil rights in the United States”.

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