Ellen Samuels

Poetry Readings from Hypermobilities

In this video, Ellen Samuels reads poems and creative nonfiction centered on disability and chronic illness from a crip perspective, including poems from her forthcoming book Hypermobilities, which is a verse-memoir in haiku drawn from her experience living with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, a connective tissue disorder.

Ellen Samuels

Ellen Samuels is Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, specializing in disability studies. Her critical writing has appeared in many journals and anthologies including GLQ, Signs, Amerasia, and The Disability Studies Reader, and in her book Fantasies of Identification: Disablity, Gender, Race (2014). Her first poetry collection, Hypermobilities, will be published in fall 2021 by The Operating System Press. Her poetry and creative nonfiction has been published widely, including in Brevity, Disability Studies Quarterly, Rogue Agent, Nimrod, Mid-American Review, Journal of the American Medical Association, and the collection Disability Visibility. She has received two Lambda Literary Awards and two Pushcart nominations, and lives in Monona with her partner, son, and a dog named Krypto.