Every Body Has a Story.
A live Zoom event
Designed and Directed by Laura Hope-Gill
May 7 and May 8, 2022 at 7pm Eastern Time
Starring Harper Hendrickson, Lana Phillips, Elizabeth Meade and Laura Hope-Gill
Close-Captioned
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“Being and becoming Disabled fills a life as much as it creates challenges. This theatrical production, using as texts poems from the anthology The Ending Hasn’t Happened Yet, edited by Hannah Soyer, presents the stories of being in a body that walks by or doesn’t speak clearly, unaware of its own precarious normalcy. When we speak of our bodies, we speak of all aspects of life that they hold. These glimpses of life with disability reveal passion, love, grief, joy, beauty and humor through an unfiltered lens. We are disabled. Our entire lives are a creative process. Every body has a story.”
Laura Hope-Gill, deaf
Performer Bios
Harper Hendrickson is a warrior of light. They are a transnonbinary poet, parent, singer songwriter, and multidisciplinary artist. Harper is proud to be autistic and disabled. They live in NYC with their partner and kitten. Harper wants trans kids everywhere to know that you are loved, you are cherished, you are precious, and accepted by a community of thousands and thousands of people who will never stop fighting for you.
Lana Phillips
Elizabeth Meade is a poet with Cerebral Palsy who lives in Asheville, North Carolina. She is the daughter of a Cameroonian immigrant mother and London-born American father. Born against the odds of survival at 22.5 weeks, she weighed just 1.1 pounds. This miracle inspires her enthusiastic exploration of life, immense gratitude, and compassionate heart. She began writing poetry when she was 14, shortly after she inexplicably lost her ability to walk. She enjoys reciting her poetry, traveling, connecting with people, animals, and nature, as well as writing the occasional song. Her poems have appeared in the magazines Kaleidoscope and The Laurel of Asheville and are forthcoming in In Between Spaces: An Anthology of Disabled Writers. She is currently working on the manuscript for her first book of poems.
Laura Hope-Gill was born in Canada and has lived in the US, Britain, and Australia. She lives in Asheville, North Carolina where she coordinates the Thomas Wolfe MFA Program at Lenoir-Rhyne University as well as the Narrative Healthcare Program, which she launched in 2013 as a means of extending narrative and poetic writing to improve communication and address moral injury for physicians and patients. She was named the first poet laureate of the Blue Ridge Parkway by the National Park Service in 2010 for her book The Soul Tree. Her two architectural histories of Asheville, Look Up Asheville 1 and 2 (Grateful Steps 2010, 2011) received awards from the North Carolina Society of Historians. She founded the city’s multicultural poetry festival, Asheville Wordest, in 2008, which received the first Harlan Gradin Award for Excellence in Public Humanities Programming in 2010. She is an NCArts Fellow for her Creative Nonfiction on deafness. Her memoir, The Deaf Sea Scrolls (Pisgah Press 2022), explores her journey into deafness through the lens of social justice and listening. In 2021 she cowrote and produced God’s Promise at Cockpit Theatre in London, England. Her essays and poems appear in Bellevue Literary Review, North Carolina Literary Review, Missouri Review, Fugue, Parabola, and more. She contributes widely to the medical community through poetry and story workshops. She is currently painting.
Based on The Ending Hasn’t Happened Yet, an anthology featuring work by those in the disabled and neurodivergent community, edited by Hannah Soyer.
This program has been supported by grants from the North Carolina Arts Council,
a division of the Department of Cultural and Natural Resources.