Staircase Reading: Petra Kuppers

On May 18, conference attendees and guests from the community will gather at The Staircase Theatre for an evening of SFF-themed literary readings. The headlining author for this event is Petra Kuppers, whose short story collection, Ice Bar, will be released in April from Spuyten Duyvil Press.

Petra is a disability activist, performance artist and a professor of English and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan. Her work, both academic and creative, engages readers and audiences with questions of change toward futures which are both socially just and enjoyable.

In addition to Ice Bar, Kuppers has published a collection of poetry, PearlStitch, also with Spuyten Duyvil Press. A chapbook of speculative poems, Green Orion Woman, will appear in 2018 from Dancing Girls.

Her poems and short stories have appeared in Anomaly, PANK, Adrienne, Accessing the Future, The Future Fire, The Sycamore Review, Visionary Tongue, Wordgathering, Poets for Living Waters, Disability Studies Quarterly, Beauty is a Verb: New Poetics of Disability, textsound, Streetnotes, About Place, and QDA: A Queer Disabled Anthology.

To read more about Petra’s work, please visit her website.

Petra will be joined by local speculative fiction writer Eileen Gunnell Lee, whose work has appeared in Escape Pod’s Artemis 3 series, and in 49th Parallels: Alternative Canadian Histories and Futures from Bundoran Press. This event will finish with an open mic—come and share your worlds with us!