To celebrate the end of the fall semester, the EHW will host a somatic free write workshop co-facilitated by Petra Kuppers and Aisha Sabatini Sloan. Bringing experience in pedagogy that fuses bodies, places, and the non-human alike, Aisha and Petra will lead us through a series of writing prompts intended to help you think and feel embodiment, place, and the various places they intersect. Whether you consider yourself a creative spirit or not, we hope you will join us in creating this generative spirit together.


Aisha Sabatini Sloan is the author ofThe Fluency of Light (University of Iowa Press 2013), Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit (1913 Press 2017), Borealis (Coffee House 2021), and a collaborative book written with her father, Captioning the Archives (McSweeney's Publications 2021). Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit was nominated for the Iowa Essay Prize, chosen by Maggie Nelson as the winner of the 1913 Open Prose Contest, and won CLMP's Firecracker award for Nonfiction in 2018. Her writing can be found in Ecotone, Ninth Letter, Callaloo, Michigan Quarterly Review, Guernica, The Paris Review, Vanity Fair, and Gulf Coast, among other journals.

Petra Kuppers is a disability culture activist and a community performance artist. She creates participatory community performance environments that think/feel into public space, tenderness, site-specific art, access, and experimentation. Petra grounds herself in disability culture methods, and uses ecosomatics, performance, and speculative writing to engage audiences toward more socially just and enjoyable futures.