Daphne Gottlieb: winner of the Firecracker & Audre Lorde awards

buy Dear Dawn

buy 15 Ways to Stay
Alive

buy Kissing Dead
Girls

buy Fucking Daphne

Home Page

books
books press events
bio bio poems journal contact


buy this book

Dear Dawn
Soft Skull Press
2012

New! Q+A with the editors!

Ten years ago, the killer was killed.

Her words live on in this story of true crime and true friendship.

Aileen Wuornos made headlines for killing 7 men. The "hitchhiking hooker" and "first female serial killer" killed 7 men. When she turned herself in, she told police that every time, she had killed in self-defense.

Every trial ended in a death sentence.

But in Florida, Aileen was working with a whole different kind of sentence—the kind with nouns and verbs, written with love to her best friend from childhood, Dawn Botkins.

Aileen's letters to Dawn are an autobiography in letters, a moving portrait of a woman who was both wound and weapon. Scammed and swindled, abused and assaulted, Aileen writes her beating, bloody heart out to Dawn.

Dear Dawn lets Aileen—finally—have her "day in court." In print.




buy this book

15 Ways to Stay Alive
Manic D Press, Inc.
2011

Broken hearts, scattered dreams, postpunk politics, and postmodern cut-up collages spiral and flow in award-winning poet Daphne Gottlieb’s latest collection of startling new works that explore survival after personal or communal disasters and the renewal that follows. Whether she’s writing about unanticipated outcomes (“After the Midway Ride Collapsed”), her mother’s passing (“Somewhere, Over”), or absurd situations (“Preoccupation”), Gottlieb’s deeply personal insights into the complex areas where life and contemporary culture collide offer readers a unique, thought-provoking perspective.



excerpts
buy this book

Kissing Dead Girls
Soft Skull Press
2008

Gertrude Stein's work is co-opted and re-seen in an attempt to unpack the relationship between love and war; Walt Whitman makes a command performance in dismembered bits of forced formal verse; and "The Exorcist" and "The Devil in Miss Jones" are sutured together in an attempt to locate the horror of desire. Fusing pornography and postfeminist theory, transcript and tell-all, these playful, penetrating poems and stories reach off the page in search of what it is to be known, both to the masses and to the "Other."

 



Fucking Daphne
Seal Press
2008

NEW! Watch video trailers for Fucking Daphne!

When Daphne Gottlieb first found herself the character in someone else’s story she was intrigued; over time, as she appeared in more and more stories, she started to wonder about the implications of what was real and what wasn’t. Did it matter that there were published stories of her having sex in bathrooms, vacant parking lots, on the balcony at a party in an old bordello? Did it matter whether or not they were true?

This question sparked the idea for Fucking Daphne, a collection that blurs the lines between reality and fiction and begs the question “who is the real Daphne?” A pill-popping wild child? A soft place to fall with a broken heart? A dreadlocked vixen?

Contributors include Hanne Blank, Stephen Elliot, Sarah Katherine Lewis, and Ariel Gore, who describe, watch, and engage with a character that is not Daphne Gottlieb; Daphne is a projection, a fantasy, a zeitgeist. We are all a multitude of people in bed. We are all Daphne.

Harnessing the playfulness of the hoax, the seductiveness of literature, and the edginess of the avant-garde, Fucking Daphne is unique in a culture hungry for sex, information, and most of all, understanding.



Jokes and the Unconscious
Cleis Press
2005

Heard the one about the dying father? In this savagely brilliant graphic novel by slam poet Daphne Gottlieb (Final Girl) and Hothead Paisan creator Diane DiMassa, a 19-year-old woman named Sasha loses her father to cancer and takes a job in the hospital where he had worked as a doctor. Moving from room to room with her clipboard of forms, Sasha encounters the insane, the suicidal, and the brave.

Photos by Joie Rey Cohen
Site design by Lea C. Deschenes