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Woody Brown

Biography

Woody Brown

In 2022, Woody Brown became the first nonspeaking autistic graduate of UCLA, where he received the English department’s top writing honors. Brown completed his MFA in creative writing at Columbia University in 2024. He lives in Los Angeles and is working on a second novel.

Woody Brown

Books by Woody Brown

Upward Bound
by Woody Brown - Coming of Age, Fiction, Literary

Upward Bound is not a place anyone dreams of spending their days. The dreary adult daycare center for Los Angeles’s disabled community is a place of last resort. This includes Carlos, a young aide who lost his mother as a boy and now works there alongside his beloved sister, Mariana; Jorge, the gentle nonspeaking giant whom Carlos seeks to befriend; Tom, a beautiful young man with cerebral palsy who pines for Ann, the summer lifeguard at the center’s pool who feels out of her depth. Then there’s Dave, Upward Bound’s director, who came to L.A. to pursue an acting career but now channels his passion into staging an overly ambitious holiday show starring the center’s irrepressible clients. Framing these intertwined narratives is the riveting and sometimes ironic testimony of Walter, a recent community college graduate who, after a family tragedy, must return to the company of his disabled peers.