Noah McSweeney grew up in Northern California as a quiet child who learned by watching and absorbing the world around him. For much of his early life, he did not yet know that it was okay to be different. “Things I told myself were not kind,” he has said, reflecting on the way difference can turn inward while misunderstood. Still, his upbringing was rooted in beauty and movement: long bike rides through Sonoma County, hikes with his parents and friends, and the steady presence of nature. 

Noah is autistic. He identifies as nonspeaking but is capable of speech; however, spoken language does not allow him to express the depth and complexity of his thoughts. For years, his inner world remained largely inaccessible to others. That changed when he was introduced to a letterboard, a communication tool that allowed him to spell words one letter at a time. 

Watching a friend use a letterboard to write poetry and communicate fully with family showed Noah what might be possible. He and his family traveled long distances to work with skilled teachers, a demanding process that ultimately transformed his life. “I could finally say the words in my head that were longing to be heard. People could now see me as intelligent instead of deficient in lacking spoken language that made sense,” Noah wrote. The letterboard became, in his words, a “trapdoor to freedom”.

That discovery opened a path to writing. While still in high school, Noah began writing poetry to make sense of what he calls his “strange consciousness.” He shared his poems at the NeuroLyrical Café, an online poetry salon for non-speakers. With his father's encouragement, those poems eventually became NoahRising, a book published in 2025 that tells a coming-of-age story told in verse and captures the struggles and triumphs of an autistic person finding his voice one letter at a time. 

At SRJC, Noah found a new outlet for his voice through journalism. After writing a guest opinion piece for Autism Awareness Day that received wide recognition, he enrolled in journalism classes and joined The Oak Leaf, SRJC’s student-run news outlet. Thought initially intimidated, Noah found encouragement from his Journalism 1 instructor, Albert Gregory, and inclusive support from Oak Leaf adviser Anne Belden. His classmates soon became his strongest allies. 

The newsroom was “the first place that I felt truly included and celebrated for my writing and my rising quirky self,” he said.

In 2025, Noah’s work was recognized at the Northern California student journalism conference, where he earned two first-place college journalism awards for opinion and column writing. The awards recognized the strength of Noah’s voice, the clarity of his thinking, and the power of his ideas, and the awards ceremony was also a moment of full inclusion. Surrounded by peers and faculty celebrating his work alongside theirs, Noach was recognized simply as a journalist

Noah’s immediate goal is to complete his associate’s degree at SRJC. Beyond that, he hopes to change how the world understands intelligence and communication. “Yes, on the surface, my aspirations are simple: I want to finish college and be a writer. I want deeply fulfilling relationships with others. I want storage of good memories to burst at the seams. (…) My ultimate dream is to remove all barriers set by those who insist on questioning my intelligence because of how I communicate.”