It isn’t every day that a yoga mat is required for an English class. But then again, Petra Kuppers isn’t the everyday English professor.

Petra Kuppers is an Associate Professor of English, Women's Studies and Theatre & Drama at the University, who answers to many labels — professor, dancer and author, to name a few. However, she is also a wheelchair user and fully embraces the label of disabled, a label she has had all her life.

The “New Traditions” requirement for College of Literature, Science and the Arts English majors offers a wide range of topics off the heavily beaten path of the standard literature class. Usually, curricula focusing on a specific ethnicity satisfy the requirement, but some classes embrace the “new” and effectively break the stereotype.

In Kuppers’s lifestyle, her history, her classes and her work, she is the embodiment of the phrase “New Traditions.”

“Writing from my cultural perspective has always been really important,” she explained. “The (disability) cultural movement is changing our world.”

Kuppers’s classes not only embrace the ideals of the University and fulfill a requirement, but they aim to break down the walls of discrimination and open students' eyes to their own bodies.

Kuppers is an artist whose medium is available at any moment and in any form. She is a dancer, an author, a producer and a teacher who is amazed and moved by the beauty of the human body. In our culture, thin bodies are sought after, but able bodies are expected. The body’s limitations are constantly exposed and revealed, from diet crazes to medical imagery practices showing the terribly intricate spreading of cancer cells.

Kuppers was born disabled in Germany and has been a wheelchair user all her life. She has traveled the world and bridged gaps between disability culture and the body as an instrument for expression.

Before becoming a tenured professor, Kuppers began her career performing poetry and engaging in the alternative and community dance scene. Her performances are multimedial, fusing video, poetry and dance and encouraging audience participation. Aside from three academic books, Kuppers has co-authored a poetry book, “Cripple Poetics: A Love Story,” with her lover and fellow disabled performer, Neil Marcus. During a performance, they dance, touch and smile at each other while reading from the book.

These few lines from Kuppers’s and Marcus’s poetry represent much of the professor’s ideals. “Petra and I are rolling round on the floor / 
In front of a curtain. behind a / curtain. under a sheet of red silk / 
how does our touch in this dance inform you? / 
what information is communicated in this way?"

Written from the perspective of her lover recounting one of their shows, it details a shared, intimate moment: the melting and reshaping of two important worlds — bodies and passion.

“The majority of responses are warm and positive,” Kuppers said about her and Marcus’s intimate book of poems.

“Many people speak to us about how empowering it was to them, to see someone speak about love and sexuality in the context of disability, and from a position of being involved in it, rather than analyzing it.”

The book’s title verges on taboo. “Cripple” holds negative connotations; it’s a harsh word to the ears of many disabled people.

“We’ve had a few people that respond very negatively to the title 'Cripple Poetics' because of the word 'cripple' in it. (But) we use the term because of its poetic richness; there’s so much more heft, so much more richness,” Kuppers said. “There’s so much more weight, so much more metaphorical density in the word ‘cripple’ than there is in ‘disability.’

“We are very interested in the meanings of the word, how it sounds in the ear, how it ripples off my tongue,” she added.