Jim Ferris

Poet, performance artist, and disability studies scholar Jim Ferris is the author of Slouching Towards Guantanamo (Main Street Rag, 2011). A long-time professor of disability studies, Ferris has served as president of the Society for Disability Studies and the Disabled & D/deaf Writers Caucus. He has received numerous awards for performance and mathematics as well as for poetry and creative nonfiction.

Ferris was born in Illinois. During childhood, he was in and out of hospitals as doctors attempted to remedy a condition in which one leg grew faster than the other. His experiences with the medical establishment and its culture became important to his work as a poet and a scholar. His groundbreaking essay “The Enjambed Body: A Step Toward a Crippled Poetics” appeared in the Georgia Review.

Ferris’s first book of poems, The Hospital Poems (2004), won the Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award. Ferris’s other books include the chapbook Facts of Life (2005). He holds a doctorate in performance studies and has performed his own work widely.