Sondra Williams makes a presentation as the keynote speaker at the Thursday session of the Southeastern Autism Symposium at Lee University. The two-day event brings together families, physicians, educators, caregivers and other professionals.CLEVELAND, Tenn. – Sondra Williams was invited to speak directly to President Barack Obama about autism last year.
A high-functioning autistic, Williams now is an author and national speaker. But as a child she was nonverbal, not speaking at all until she was 3.
“People forget there’s more to a person than autism,” Williams said in her Thursday keynote address at the ninth annual Southeastern Autism Symposium at Lee University. “I do not ‘suffer’ from autism. It is what it is.”
In her address, Williams, a mother of four, talked about the language, emotional and communication barriers between autistic people and others.
She read her poem, “They Say,” about being diagnosed with Asperger syndrome, a type of autism. Afterward she said, “Sometimes people think we are not aware, when we are very much aware of what’s going on around us.”