Petra Kuppers

Petra Kuppers is a disability culture activist and a community performance artist. She is the Anita Gonzalez Collegiate Professor of Performance Studies and Disability Culture in the English and Women’s and Gender Studies departments at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and she teaches in the low-residency MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts at Goddard College.

Kuppers 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. She was a 2021 Dance Research Fellow at the New York Public Library's Jerome Robbins Dance Division, where she created the ongoing Crip/Mad Archive Dances, and she was a 2022–2023 Dance/USA Fellow. In April 2023, Kuppers was named a Guggenheim Fellow.

Kuppers is the author of Diver Beneath the Street (Wayne State University Press, 2024), which investigates true crime and ecopoetry at the level of the soil; Gut Botany (Wayne State University Press, 2020), named one of the top ten US poetry books of 2020 by the New York Public Library, and winner of a 2022 Environmental Creative Writing Book Award from the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment; Ice Bar (Spuyten Duyvil, 2018); Green Orion Woman (Dancing Girl Press, 2018); PearlStitch (Spuyten Duyvil, 2016); and Cripple Poetics: A Love Story (Homofactus Press, 2008), a collaboration with poet and performance artist Neil Marcus and photographer Lisa Steichman.

Kuppers’s poems, short stories, and other writing have been published in journals including Edge Effects, Orion, Anomaly, PANK, Adrienne, Poets for Living Waters, Disability Studies Quarterly, textsound, Streetnotes, and About Place as well as anthologies such as Accessing the Future: A Disability-Themed Speculative Fiction Anthology (Futurefire.net Publishing, 2015), QDA: A Queer Disability Anthology (Squares & Rebels, 2015), and Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability (Cinco Puntos Press, 2011).

Kuppers is the artistic director of The Olimpias, an international disability culture collective, and the cocreator of the Turtle Disco, a community performance environment in Ypsilanti, Michigan, with her wife Stephanie Heit.