Your Healing is Killing Me is a performance manifesto based on lessons learned in San Antonio free health clinics and New York acupuncture schools; from the treatments and consejos of curanderas, abortion doctors, Marxist artists, community health workers, and bourgie dermatologists. One artist's reflections on living with post-traumatic stress disorder, ansia, and eczema in the new age of trigger warnings, the master cleanse, and crowd-funded self-care. Capitalism is toxic but the Revolution is not in your body butter.

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About the Author

From panzas to prisons, from street theatre to large-scale multimedia performances, from princess to chafa - Virginia Grise writes plays that are set in bars without windows, barrio rooftops, and lesbian bedrooms.

Her published work includes Your Healing is Killing Me (Plays Inverse Press), blu (Yale University Press), The Panza Monologues co-written with Irma Mayorga (University of Texas Press) and an edited volume of Zapatista communiques titled Conversations with Don Durito (Autonomedia Press). Virginia is a recipient of the Yale Drama Award, Whiting Writers' Award, the Princess Grace Award in Theatre Directing, and the Jerome Fellowship from the Playwrights Center. She is an alumna of the Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab, the Women's Project Theatre Lab and the NALAC Leadership Institute.

In addition to plays, she has created an interdisciplinary body of work that includes multimedia performance, dance theater, performance installations, guerilla theater, site-specific interventions, and community gatherings. Virginia has taught writing for performance at the university level, as a public school teacher, in community centers, women's prisons, and in the juvenile correction system. She holds an MFA in Writing for Performance from the California Institute of the Arts and is The Mellon Foundation Playwright in Residence at Cara Mia Theatre in Dallas, Texas and a Matakyev Research Fellow at the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands at Arizona State University.

Reviews

With humor, gravity, and hard-won insight, Virginia Grise delivers the dazzling but bittersweet dispatches of a journey through the rocky landscapes of healthcare and self-care-the folly and wisdom it takes to arrive at the body's best spiritual medicine. - Rigoberto Gonzalez, author of Unpeopled Eden

Virginia breaks the heart open with the poetic force of this work. Ceremoniously / transgressively she calls out the Truth-the Ancestors know that we are all in need of healing, so they've prayed all that we need inside of our blood and bones. This book is the topography of that. - Sharon Bridgforth, performing artist and author of love conjure/blues

In Your Healing Is Killing Me, Virginia Grise weaves the fabric of her life as an artist with threads from Chairman Mao's 4 Minute Physical Fitness Plan, traditional healing rituals, ancient recipes for the heart and skin, and memories emerging from past suppression-both personal and colonial. This Texicana priestess-poet heals herself and us with these alchemical deconstructions of the pain that comes from picking at the scars of human survival. One remedy: read this book. Just remember to breathe while you do so. - Migdalia Cruz, author of El Grito del Bronx & Other Plays

Book Information
ISBN 9780991418398
Author Virginia Grise
Format Paperback
Page Count 104
Imprint 53rd State Press
Publisher 53rd State Press