Your Healing is Killing Me

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 communiqués 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 Mía Theatre in Dallas, Texas and a Matakyev Research Fellow at the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands at Arizona State University.

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 González, author of Unpeopled EdenVirginia 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/bluesIn 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