It happened just after Christina Crosby, a literature professor at Wesleyan, had turned a “very fit, hale, and hearty’’ 50. On one of her regular 17-mile bicycle rides, along a route she knew intimately, a branch wedged itself into the spokes of her wheel, stopping the bike and flinging Crosby violently to the pavement. The impact broke many bones in her face; worse, it damaged her spinal cord, leaving her a quadriplegic.

“The accident made me unrecognizable to myself,’’ said Crosby. “I was devastated. I was absolutely devastated. I often wished I had died. I was in tremendous pain. And I think that the depth of my suffering turned me toward language and literature, because that’s what I had always known and worked with for my life.’’

So Crosby began writing, long before she knew she was writing a book. “I wrote in order to understand who I had become or what I had become,’’ she said. “And, of course, to understand that, I discovered it took me back to my childhood and to my youth, to my family life, to my life with friends.’’

The title of Crosby’s new book is “A Body, Undone: Living on After Great Pain,’’ a nod to the Emily Dickinson poem that begins, “After great pain, a formal feeling comes — .’’ For Crosby, the moment Dickinson describes is “an interval that opens between life and death. And the question is, which way are you going to turn?’’

Writing about her own devastation, as honestly as possible, Crosby said, “has helped me to live on.’’

Living on doesn’t mean denying what she has lost. Crosby finds inspirational narratives about injury to be “pernicious and damaging to the truth,’’ and she hopes to leave her own mark on the flourishing field of disability studies. “My contribution to the field will be in my insistence on grief,’’ Crosby said.

Crosby will read at 7 p.m. Monday at the Harvard Coop, 1400 Mass. Ave., Cambridge.

Kate Tuttle, a writer and editor, can be reached at kate.tuttle@gmail.com.