Petra Kuppers
Petra Kuppers is a disability culture activist, a community performance artist, and a Professor at the University of Michigan. She leads The Olimpias, a performance research collective. Her Disability Culture and Community Performance: Find a Strange and Twisted Shape (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) explores arts-based research methods. She is editor of Somatic Engagement (ChainLinks, 2011), and the author of Studying Disability Arts and Culture: An Introduction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), a book of practical exercises for classrooms. A new poetry collection, Pearl Stitch, appears in 2016 with Spuyten Duyvil.
As an artist, she works interdependently, and makes use of artful support: this poem cites lines from fellow queercrip dancer Marissa Perel’s performance experiments and from experimental writer and bodyworker Bhanu Kapil’s interviews from The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers (2001)