Join the Michigan Quarterly Review and Literati to celebrate the launch of MQR's Spring 2023 special issue, "SomaFlights," guest edited by Vidhu Aggarwal and U-M's own Petra Kuppers! Dock with us to explore the tectonics of somatic imaginations. Fly with synesthetic energies, grounded in delicious sensory embodiment. Featuring readings from issue contributors.
Click here to join the webinar event on 6/18. No pre-registration required!
Readers:
Ashwini Bhasi is a bioinformatician from Kerala, India who explores the somatics of trauma, chronic pain and disability through molecular genetics, poetry and visual art. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in DIAGRAM, Honey Literary, Frontier Poetry, The Offing, RHINO and elsewhere. Musth, the winner of the 2020 CutBank chapbook contest, is her first poetry collection.
Ahana Ganguly is a writer and editor based in New York City. She is a second-year MFA candidate at Pratt Institute and holds a BA in English from Pomona College. She is the submissions editor for Futurepoem and an editorial associate at Enchanted Lion Books. She works primarily in creative nonfiction and the essay.
Megan Kaminski is a poet and essayist and the author of three books of poetry, most recently Gentlewomen (Noemi Press, 2020). Prairie Divination (Sunseen Press, 2022), her illustrated collection of essays + oracle deck with artist L. Ann Wheeler, turns to the plants, animals, and geological features of the prairie as guides for living in good relation to one another. She is Associate Professor of Poetry Writing at the University of Kansas.
Interdisciplinary artist and scholar Cynthia Ling Lee creates work that instigates queer, crip, and feminist-of- color interventions. Lee’s literary output primarily takes the form of writing for performance; her performance work has been presented internationally at venues including Dance Theater Workshop (New York), East West Players (Los Angeles), Kuandu Arts Festival (Taipei), and Chandra-Mandapa: Spaces (Chennai). Cynthia is an Associate Professor in the Department of Performance, Play & Design at UC Santa Cruz.
Angela Peñaredondo is a queer, nonbinary filipinx writer and author of nature felt but never apprehended (Noemi Press, 2023), All Things Lose Thousands of Times (winner of the 2016 Inlandia Institute’s Hillary Gravendyk Prize), and the chapbook, Maroon ( Jamii Publishing). Their work can be found in the Academy of American Poets, Pleiades, Apogee, and elsewhere. They are a recipient of fellowships to Kundiman, Macondo, Tin House, and the Community of Writers and are an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at California State University, San Bernardino.
Ricky Ray is a poet, essayist, and eco-mystic who lives with his wife and his old brown dog in the old green hills of the Hudson Valley. He is the author of Fealty; Quiet, Grit, Glory; and The Sound of the Earth Singing to Herself, a finalist for the Laurel Prize. He was educated at Columbia University and Bennington College, and he lectures on poetry, animism, and integral ecology.
Tim Jones-Yelvington is the author of the fiction volumes Don’t Make Me Do Something We’ll Both Regret (Texas Review Press), Strike a Prose: Memoirs of a Lit Diva Extraordinaire (co•im•press), This Is a Dance Movie! (Tiny Hardcore Press), and Evan’s House and the Other Boys Who Live There (Rose Metal Press) and the prize-winning poetry volumes Colton Behavioral Therapy (Gazing Grain Press) and Become on Yr Face (DIAGRAM/New Michigan Press).
Editors:
Vidhu Aggarwal's books of poems, The Trouble with Humpadori (2016) and Daughter Isotope (2021), take mobile forms in video, comics, and performance. Vidhu is the Theodore Bruce and Barbara Lawrence Alfond Chair of Literature at Rollins College and teaches postcolonial/transnational literatures and intermedia poetic practices.
Petra Kuppers is a disability culture activist and a community performance artist, and co-creator of Turtle Disco. Her poetry collections include Gut Botany (2020), PearlStitch (2016) and Cripple Poetics (with Neil Marcus) (2008). She is the Anita Gonzalez Collegiate Professor of Performance Studies and Disability Culture at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.