Summer news from artist Petra Kuppers
Join me for Petra's Zoom celebration, June 21!
Join me, writer Carol Dorf, and interdisciplinary/dance artist Raven Malouf-Renning as we celebrate Petra Kuppers’ new poetry chapbook, Pain Planet!
Saturday, June 21 at 6pm Eastern [Note time change from 5pm.]
ZOOM: https://umich.zoom.us/j/92336536091
Meeting ID: 923 3653 6091
Passcode required: 609504
Based in Michigan, Petra has long been honored for her multidisciplinary work in the arts and disability culture. I’d never had the chance to meet her, but I wanted to and was intrigued to get word of weekly explorative group sessions, Starship Somatics, she was offering over Zoom through New York dance organization Movement Research.
I quickly signed up and, from late 2023 through 2024, took part in many of these virtual gatherings. Each time, without fail, they gifted me and my own work with surprises and miracles. Petra is a mage, a joyful explorer of all realms.
She describes her sessions here:
Starship Somatics Sessions engage our bodymindspirits as portals, as trance-mobiles that honor pasts and jet us toward speculative futures, among the stars, in flux and transformation. These classes use improvised movement (inner and outer movement, as is accessible and appropriate to you), dream journeys, sounding, writing, and drawing as our transportation devices: firmly grounded in the sensory immediacy of our beds, sofas, floors and windows, and flying wide to honor ways of being of all kinds. All welcome, grounded in disability culture values.
And here, from Petra’s Newsletter - June 2025: Summer Shenanigans, are more details about Pain Planet and our June 21 celebration:
Poet and Eco-Feminist Su Zi, one of my fellow Zoeglossia disability poetry fellows, invited me to publish Pain Planet, my starship-somaticky brand of ecopoetics, as one of the Red Mare limited edition chapbooks: covers individually printed on Fabriano paper, with a handmade mulberry inclusion flyleaf, with a handsewn cotton binding. The short collection starts with a sonnet crown: seven interlinked poems that take you into earth/star imaginations of tectonics, planetary assemblies, and the flow of chronic pain shifts – familiar territories to anybody who has participated in my Starship Somatics movement meditations in the last five years.
On the day after solstice night, three wonderful people who have flown with me to distant stars and deep into our beloved Earth will help us launch this collection. June 21st, 6pm ET, via zoom, Passcode: 609504.
My co-celebrants:
Carol Dorf has received fellowships from the Hawthornden Foundation, Zoeglossia, and the Napa Writers’ Conference. Their writing appears on the Poetry Foundation website, in several chapbooks, and in Pleiades, About Place, Cutthroat, Five South, YesYesPoetry. and Scientific American. Founding poetry editor of Talking Writing, they taught math at Berkeley High.
Raven Malouf-Renning is an interdisciplinary artist, choreographer, and scholar hailing from the San Francisco Bay Area and currently based in New York City. Their art and research lives at the intersection of Disability Studies and Queer and Trans Studies through the body as a living archive.
Eva Yaa Asantewaa won a 2017 New York Dance and Performance ("Bessie") Award for decades of service as a dance journalist, curator, educator, and advocate. She now writes fantasy novels centering contemporary Black queer characters. Ms. Yaa Asantewaa maintains a counseling practice based in animism and Tarot.
Thank you, Petra, for this lovely invitation to celebrate with you, and thank you for all you’ve shared with us!
Petra Kuppers: a visionary! Love her work!
Oh yay! I love Petra’s starship!