Alice Wong was born on March 27, 1974 in the Indianapolis, Indiana suburbs, to parents who had immigrated from Hong Kong. She was born with spinal muscular atrophy, a neuromuscular disorder, and had stopped walking by seven or eight, and would later become an activist for the disability community and author. Wong graduated from Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis with a bachelor's degree in English & Sociology in 1997. She earned a master's degree in medical sociology from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) in 2004. Wong founded the Disability Visibility Project (DVP) and worked as Project Coordinator. DVP is a project that collects oral histories of people with disabilities in the US, run in coordination with StoryCorps and as of 2018, the projected collected roughly 140 oral histories. Wong served as an advisory board member for Asians & Pacific Islanders with Disabilities of California. In 2013, she was appointed by President Barack Obama to the National Council on Disability, an independent federal agency with advises the president, Congress, and other federal agencies on disability programs, policies, and practices. Wong served in this capacity from 2013 to 2015. For her leadership and activism on behalf of the disability community, Wong received awards from the San Francisco area - the Martin Luther King Jr Award from UCSF in 2007, the UCSF Chancellor's Disability Service Award in 2010, and the San Francisco Mayor's Disability Council Beacon Award in 2010. In 2016, she received the American Association of People with Disabilities Paul G. Hearne Leadership Award, an award for leaders with disabilities who exemplify leadership, advocacy, and dedication to the broader cross-disability community. In 2020, Wong was selected as a Ford Foundation Disability Futures Fellow and was named to the list of the BBC's 100 Women. Over the years, she has written several books - Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century (which has an adult copy and teen copy), Year of the Tiger: An Activist's Life, and Disability Intimacy: Essays on Love, Care, and Desire. Wong passed away on November 14, 2025 due to an infection. (The Quincy Public Library has multiple books on activism and life with disabilities, if you are interested in reading beyond Alice Wong's work.)
Rebecca Heineman was born on October 30, 1963, in Whittier, California. She was a video game designer and programmer, a gaming champion, and the co-founder of multiple video game companies. When Heineman was young, she could not afford to purchase games for her Atari and as a result, taught herself to copy cartridges and built a sizable, pirated video game collection. This eventually led to her learning to reverse engineer the console's code to understand how the games were made and worked. In 1980, Heineman went to LA with a friend to compete in a regional qualifying round of a National Atari 2600 Space Invaders champion ship and won. Later in the year, she won the championship In New York, becoming the first champion of the national U.S. video game tournament. After winning the tournament, Heineman was offered a job writing for the magazine Electronic Games and a consultancy job for a book How to Master Video Games. She was able to meet the owners of Avalon Hill, through the job at the magazine, and was hired as a programmer. In this position, she created the studio's game engine, base code for several software projects, and a manual for the company's programming team. Over the years, Heinemann programmed for various video games, created ports for a variety of platforms, was a software architect for Amazon, and trained Microsoft employees during the creation of the original Xbox. Additionally, she was the "Transgender Chair" of Amazon's LGBT group, was part of the board of directors for GLAAD, and starting in 2011, was part of the advisory board of the Videogame History Museum. In 2025, Heineman was diagnosed with adenocarcinoma, an aggressive form of cancer, and passed away on November 17, 2025. If you want to become more familiar with the history of videogames, a few books to checkout would be: Everything to Play For: How Videogames Are Changing the World, Ready Reader One: The Stories We Tell With, About, and Around Videogames, and Press Reset: The Ruin and Recovery of the Video Game Industry. QPL also has a nice collection of videogames, for those so inclined.