If you live in or around DC, join Scars: An Anthology contributor, poet, and chair of the Disabilities Studies Program at The University of Toledo Jim Ferris for a panel next Thursday, 4/14/16, "Cripping the Intersections: Readings Probing Disability and Identity." (Facebook Event Page.) His Scars: An Anthology contribution, "Scars: A Love Story" is a script of Ferris's performance piece which, like a scar, transforms in the telling. Jim writes:

"Scars are places where the separation of inside and out has been breeched and then reestablished. Scars help to keep outside out and inside in. But they also mark that breech, even historicize it: a breech occurred here . . . and it may return."

Panel Description: Disability – the one identity category that cuts across all the other lines. This themed reading will use poetry to explore some of the ways that the range of human circumstances we call disability weave through many other facets of identity, including race, gender, class, religion and spirituality, sexual orientation, level of education, and age. Disability intersects in complex ways with all other identity categories. This reading promises to challenge and trouble a variety of identity categories, probing the sometimes startling ways that seemingly disparate vectors of identity can converge. Discussion will follow; challenges, provocations, and jokes encouraged. Cripping the Intersections: Readings Probing Disability and Identity Jim Ferris, Jill Khoury, Mike Northen, L. Lamar Wilson, Kathi Wolfe. At Charles Sumner School Museum & Archives Room 102.

Below, "Scarbill" by Et Alia Press's layout and graphic designer Kathy Oliverio precedes Ferris's piece in Scars: An Anthology.