What do you do when you learn you’re not exactly who you think you are? And why does my uncle want me to just shut up about it? This performance digs into one family’s past to explore the fabrication of race, the implications of disability, and the lattice of assumptions making up cultural identity. This event will be reading of a script by Dr. Ferris followed by a discussion with the audience.

Jim Ferris, PhD, is an award-winning poet and performance artist, author of Slouching Towards Guantanamo, Facts of Life, and The Hospital Poems. Poet Laureate of Lucas County, Ohio from 2015-2020, he holds a doctorate in performance studies and has performed at the Kennedy Center and across the United States, Canada and Great Britain. His current performance project, entitled “Is Your Mama White?”, uses his family history to explore race, class and disability as powerful components of identity.

Ferris’s writing has appeared in many journals, including Poetry, Georgia Review, Text & Performance Quarterly,  and Michigan Quarterly Review. His writing is also featured in the anthology, Beauty Is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability.

Past president of the Society for Disability Studies and the Disabled & D/deaf Writers Caucus, he has won awards for creative nonfiction and mathematics as well as performance and poetry. Ferris holds the Ability Center Endowed Chair in Disability Studies at the University of Toledo, where his research interests focus on disability art, culture, and communication.