Petra Kuppers + Stephanie Heit

At this unique event, Stephanie Heit and Petra Kuppers will hold open spaces of healing by sharing scores and insights from Tendings, small everyday collaborative practices that combine experiential anatomy, eco-specific investigations, somatic exercises, and writing. They will follow these practical explorations with sample writings from Stephanie’s The Color She Gave Gravity, and Petra’s PearlStitch, feminist poetics in queer/crip/mad space.
Stephanie Heit is a poet, dancer, and teacher of somatic writing, Contemplative Dance Practice, and Kundalini Yoga. She lives with bipolar disorder and is a member of the Olimpias, an international disability performance collective. Her debut poetry collection, The Color She Gave Gravity (The Operating System 2017), was a Nightboat Poetry Prize finalist. Her work most recently appeared in Midwestern Gothic, Typo, Streetnotes, Nerve Lantern, QDA: A Queer Disability Anthology, Spoon Knife Anthology, Theatre Topics, and Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance.
stephanieheitpoetry.wordpress.com
Petra Kuppers is a disability culture activist, a community performance artist, and a Professor of English and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan, teaching in performance studies. She also teaches on the low-residency MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts at Goddard College. Her most recent poetry collection, PearlStitch, appeared with Spuyten Duyvil Press (2016). She is the Artistic Director of The Olimpias, an international disability culture collective, and in 2016/7 she was engaged in the Asylum Project, co-led with her partner Stephanie Heit.