2513 Jackson Ave
Ann Arbor, MI 48103
USA
Jill Darling is a writer and teacher and has published poetry, fiction, and creative and critical essays. Her books include a geography of syntax, Solve For, and begin with may: a series of moments as well as two collaborative chapbooks with Laura Wetherington and Hannah Ensor: at the intersection of 3, and The First Steps are the Deepest. Other work can be found online at sites such as Something on Paper, The Quint, Ethos Review, Hybrid Pedagogy, How2, Aufgabe, Horse Less Review, Two Serious Ladies, and Unlikely Stories. Darling has won awards from The Academy of American Poets, and the Mary Anderson Center for the Arts in Indiana. She lives in Ypsilanti with her partner and dog.
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. The Color She Gave Gravity (The Operating System 2017) is her debut poetry collection, and her work most recently appeared in Midwestern Gothic, Lime Hawk, About Place, Dunes Review, Typo, Disability Studies Quarterly, Streetnotes, Nerve Lantern, Queer Disability Anthology, Theatre Topics, and Research in Drama Education. She lives in Ypsilanti, Michigan where she co-creates Turtle Disco, a community arts space, with her partner and collaborator, Petra Kuppers. www.stephanieheitpoetry.wordpress.com
Petra Kuppers is a disability culture activist, a community performance artist and a professor at the University of Michigan. Her most recent poetry collection is PearlStitch (Spuyten Duyvil: 2016). Poems and stories have appeared in PANK, The Sycamore Review, Adrienne, Visionary Tongue, Future Fire, Wordgathering, Beauty is a Verb: New Poetics of Disability, textsound, Streetnotes, Festival Writer, Accessing the Future: A Disability-Themed Anthology of Speculative Fiction, QDA: Queer Disability Anthology, and elsewhere. She is the Artistic Director of The Olimpias, an international disability culture collective, and lives with her partner Stephanie Heit in Ypsilanti where they co-create Turtle Disco, a community arts space.
Books:
Through reflective meditation and energetic word-play, a geography of syntax takes readers on a journey through landscape, contemporary culture, and language. The tour wanders among topographies of current events, memory, art, and loss among others, and points to ways meaning and understanding of phenomena in the world are constructed through, and altered by, language. The vivid description, color, and imagistic detail combine to create imaginative worlds, spaces within yet on the edge of the everyday, while showing the difficulty of articulating aspects of life that we struggle to even comprehend.
The Color She Gave Gravity traces longing for connection between women. An ecopoetics of the bodymind, these poems take us inside a dance inside an imaginary city inside sculpted spaces inside the insomniac body inside sister grief inside she. The work emerges from a landscape of somatic engagement and from experiences of psychiatric systems and multiple hospitalizations.
PearlStitch is about disability culture activism; feminist poetics history; collaborative practices of mourning, celebration and engagement; about love and transformation.
