Stephanie Heit (she/her) is a queer disabled poet, dancer, teacher and co-director of Turtle Disco, a somatic writing space on Anishinaabe territory in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Her practices explore the seams of movement, language, and mental health differences often within site-specific inquiries involving water. She is bipolar, a mad activist, a shock/psych system survivor and a member of the Olimpias, an international disability performance collective. Her poetry collections are "The Color She Gave Gravity" (Operating System, 2017) and "PSYCH MURDERS" (Wayne State University Press, 2022), a book of hybrid memoir poems that invites readers inside psychiatric wards and shock treatments toward new futures of care. "PSYCH MURDERS" won the Midwest Book Award Gold Medal, IPPY Bronze Medal, and was a finalist for the Next Generation Indie Book Award. Learn more at stephanie-
Petra Kuppers (she/her) is a disability culture activist, community performance artist and poet. Her third performance poetry collection, "Gut Botany" (Wayne State University Press, 2020), was named one of the top ten U.S. poetry books of 2020 by the New York Public Library and won the 2022 Creative Book Award by the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment. Her fourth poetry collection, "Diver Beneath the Street," investigates true crime and ecopoetry at the level of the soil, at the limit of life and death (Wayne State University Press, February 2024, finalist, Julie Suk Book Award).
Kuppers is the Anita Gonzalez Collegiate Professor of Performance Studies and Disability Culture at the University of Michigan. She was a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow and is currently at work on Planting Disabled Futures, a virtual reality/community performance project, as a Just Tech Fellow (2024-2026). Learn more at petrakuppers.com.
Please join us in the Community Foundation Theater, located in Gund Gallery, on Tuesday, Jan. 27, at 4:15 p.m.
Sponsored by the Department of English and the Faculty Lectureship Series.