#42 Encore - Petra Kuppers

This month we're rebroadcasting one of our favorites from 2022. Here, Mary talks with Petra Kuppers, a disability culture activist and community performance artist who lives in delighted concert with the natural world, sharing in powerful intelligence, adapdibility and love of True Nature.

Petra holds the Anita Gonzalez Professor of Performance Studies and Disability Culture chair in English and Women's & Gender studies departments at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She also teaches on the low-residency MFA Interdisciplinary Arts faculty at Goddard College. In her work, Petra uses somatic and speculative writing as well as performance practice to engage audiences toward more socially just and enjoyable futures. She has written academic books on disability arts and culture, medicine and performance, and community performance.

In their conversation, Mary and Petra explore the natural world and its diversity, alongside the political, spiritual and activist considerations that arise from being embodied.

Learn more about Petra Kuppers’ art, writing and activism by visiting her website at https://www.petrakuppers.com

Check out Petra’s poetry books like Gut Botany, her speculative fiction like Ice Bar and her scholarship, most recently in her book Eco Soma with the University of Minnesota Press in the Art After Nature series. You can find more on disability culture in the anthology, Disability Visibility edited by Alice Wong, available as a pdf at the link.

And, in the meantime, Petra has been awarded and is currently a Guggenheime Fellow spending recent months at the Camargo Foundation in Southern France. You can check out the video work she's completed there - Crip/Mad Archive Dances project: a final 35 min video documentary.

She's also completed a new poetry collection, Diver Beneath the Street -- true crime meets eco poetry at the level of the soil, out May 2024.