Petra Kuppers

Petra Kuppers (she/her) is a disability culture activist, a community performance artist, and a poet. Petra grounds herself in disability culture methods, and she uses somatics, performance, media, and speculative writing to engage audiences toward more socially just and enjoyable futures. Her third performance poetry collection, Gut Botany (Wayne State University Press, 2020), was named one of the top ten US poetry books of 2020 by the New York Public Library and won the 2022 Creative Book Award by the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment. Her fourth poetry collection, Diver Beneath the Street, investigates true crime and ecopoetry at the level of the soil, at the limit of life and death (Wayne State University Press, February 2024). Petra is an Emeritus Fellow of the Black Earth Institute, and the Anita Gonzalez Collegiate Professor of Performance Studies and Disability Culture at the University of Michigan. She is currently at work on Planting Disabled Futures, a virtual reality/community performance project, as a Just Tech Fellow (2024–2026).