Ever since it opened in 2015, Karma’s Coffee House in Cullman has seen its share of crowd-attracting special events: live music, book signings, pop-ins from local celebrities — that sort of thing. But the story behind the book signing that’ll take place early next month at the popular Warehouse District business might be as compelling as the story contained in the very book that the upcoming event aims to celebrate.

On Friday, Nov. 8, 21-year-old author Sammy Ragsdale will be hanging out at the coffee house to sign copies of “Fishing for Fin” — his new children’s book about a memorable fishing trip — that features illustrations from local artist Cynthia P. Childers.
It’ll take quite an effort for Ragsdale and his family to get here: Hitting the road from the tiny town of Zavalla (a rural east Texas community located about midway between Beaumont and Shreveport, La.), Ragsdale — who has cerebral palsy — can’t walk or talk without mechanical and technological assistance.

The limits nature has imposed on Ragsdale’s communication and mobility, though, won’t stop him from making the journey — just as they haven’t stopped him from writing Fishing for Fin in the first place. Thanks to a locally owned software company, as well as a local nonprofit, he was able to author and finish his first book with assistance from engineer Gaylon Ponder, the owner of a Bremen-based tech company known as Words+.

Words+ makes the software Ragsdale used to write Fishing for Fin, and, as Ponder notes, it’s the 2024-updated version of the very same software that famed theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking used, while afflicted with ALS, to write his breakthrough bestselling cosmology book A Brief History of Time.

Through AAC Works, Org, the local nonprofit Ponder founded “to assist people who are speech and mobility impaired [to] find ongoing jobs that lead to successful vocational careers,” Ponder has been assisting Ragsdale using the internet throughout the young author’s book-writing journey, all while using Words+ — the very software company Ponder owns — as the go-to way for Ragsdale to put his ideas to digital paper.

Rather than remaining content with a life that relegates him to inactivity, Ragsdale has taken advantage of the proactive, can-do approach to disability that AAC Works, Org was created to foster.

Ponder’s goal with the outreach is “to give people who don’t have the same physical abilities as the rest of us the ability to still be functional assets to society — rather than accept what society typically expects for them,” explains fellow children’s author Elena Caudle, the local friend whom Ponder sought out for book-writing advice after Ragsdale expressed an interest in writing a story of his own.

With copies of his now-published book in tow, Ragsdale will be the author of the hour at his Nov. 8 book signing at Karma’s. In the bargain, he’ll be handing out a unique kind of autograph — a digital “fingerprint” in place of the conventional scrawled signature his hands have denied him — that’s as singular as his own personal story.

Ragsdale will sign copies of his children’s book Fishing for Fin from 5:30 p.m. until 7 p.m. at Karma’s Coffee House in Cullman (103 First Avenue NE).