Rising Stars: Meet Maxwell Joy Moore

Today we’d like to introduce you to Maxwell Joy Moore

Hi Maxwell Joy, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
I believe that I was born disabled and people are just now catching up to how truly expansive my brain is as an adult. I was born 3 months premature at the tiny weight of 2 lbs and 2 ozs. I was a high-risk pregnancy and a wonderbaby, for sure. I had to bake in an incubator oven for over 3 months before I could leave the NICU at Jacobi Hospital in The Bronx. I start here, because I have always been surpassing the odds, from the very beginning of my life up until this point at the ripe age of 35.

But time travel back a decade with me to 5 days after my 24th birthday, when I was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. It was then that I started to realize that I could bring my story to the world after experiencing a rigorous recovery that involved learning how to learn to walk again and training my left eye to see correctly. When I gave myself a chance to heal, I learned that I developed damage from what was essentially a brain injury triggered by my own immune system.

In light of this, I wanted to transmute my pain into art but had a hard time finding examples that looked or spoke like me. I created a podcast called POWER NOT PITY in 2017. POWER NOT PITY is all about amplifying and delighting in the lived experiences of disabled people of color. I joke that the podcast is “acclaimed but not award-winning yet” because it has been featured in many places and spaces such as Forbes, Colorlines, and Autostraddle over the years but has yet to win a podcasting award.

We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
It has not been a smooth road, my life has never been easy even from the beginning of my inception. But there are so many possibilities in the complexities of a life steeped in creativity. Some of the struggles I had along the way were related to my own perception of what an artist is and what an artist should be. These days, I’m proud to say my podcasting work is art, but it was difficult for me to get to this place. First, I had to admit and accept that I am an artist and that the Creator breathes through me (not the other way around). Then I had to come to the decision that staying stuck was only going to payoff badly, that stagnation is a thing that I struggled with for years. Now that I’ve cleared that limiting belief away, I’m in a place where I’m more easily able to receive downloads from the universe. It’s been a fabulous, heart-breaking, and arduous process, but it is so worth it. I feel as though I vibrate differently when I’m creating/in production mode. I learned all of this so far in 6 weeks of The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron.

Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
Under No Pity Productions, I make media and facilitate groups for those of us who feel unheard but unafraid to be visible and authentic. With my podcast, POWER NOT PITY, I create irresistible narratives about the Black, trans, disabled experience through my interviews. With my facilitation work, I help create the container for disabled people to have impactful conversations. Here is my bio:

Maxwell Joy Moore (ze/they) is a podcaster, poet and political agitator with a fierce desire to create fresh and irresistible narratives about the Black trans disabled experience. Ze is the host, producer, editor and sound engineer of POWER NOT PITY, a podcast about the lived experiences of disabled people of color. Max’s episodes serve as a vehicle for amplifying, preserving, and delighting in the voices of disabled people of color. Ze is committed to interjecting disability justice in any conversation ze has and loves to cultivate collaborative energy with writers, artists and storytellers within zir community. Maxwell was the 2019 Stitcher Breakthrough Fellow, a 2019 Werk It! Presenter, featured at the 2020 Afros and Audio Festival and a virtual presenter at Podcast Movement 2021. Their work has been featured in Forbes Magazine, Colorlines, and Disability Visibility Project to name a few. Max is and will always be a proud Jamaican-American, queer, trans non-binary, disabled alien-prince from The Bronx.

Can you tell us more about what you were like growing up?
I was an embarrassing mix of inquisitiveness, neurospiciness, and gender confusion. Much like I do now, I was always reading at least 7 books at one time. I would usually read science fiction and fantasy when I was a kid. I loved (and still love) live music so much, I initially worked in the music industry as a merch girl. Back then, there weren’t as many Black people rocking out loud in public, I was often the only one at rock concerts – people even teased me and questioned me constantly about why I listened to the music I used to. To that, I would respond by putting my headphones back on. These days, I still use headphones and speakers I used when I was a teenager, but for podcasting.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.powernotpitypod.com
• Instagram: @powernotpity
• Facebook: @powernotpity
• Twitter: @powernotpity
• Youtube: @powernotpity