Daphne Gottlieb

Daphne Gottlieb is the award-winning author of ten books including her recent collection of short stories, Pretty Much Dead. Previous works include Dear Dawn: Aileen Wuornos in her Own Words, a collection of letters from Death Row by the “first female serial killer” to her childhood best friend. She is also the author of five books of poetry, editor of two anthologies, and, with artist Diane DiMassa, the co-creator of the graphic novel Jokes and the Unconscious. She has relentlessly toured coast to coast, headlining solo tours as well as appearing with Hal Sirowitz, Lydia Lunch, and Maggie Estep. She has appeared at SXSW, Bumbershoot, and LadyFest Bay Area, and her poetry, fiction and essays have appeared in more than 50 anthologies.

Daphne is the winner of the Acker Award for Excellence in the Avant-Garde, the Audre Lorde Award for Poetry, the Firecracker Alternative Book Award, and is a five-time finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. She lives in San Francisco, where she is frequently seen with her three-pound, toothless, humpback chihuahua, Doomsday Honeymoon, nestled in her arms.

Books

Homewrecker

An Adultery Anthology

Exploring the realities of public piety and private philandering, Homewrecker combines fiction, nonfiction, and poetry to present a multitude of perspectives on adultery and the emotional complexity that affairs entail. Acclaimed contemporary writers share space with fresh talent in its pages, each with a different take on adultery and its aftermath. In "The Other Man," Stephen Elliot remembers the dominatrix who two-timed him with a square. Lori Selke spins steamy erotica in "Sex and the Married Dyke," a story about how quickly queer marriage can degenerate into extramarital queer activity. Neal Pollack's "Confessions of a Dial-up Gigolo" recalls the early days of the Internet when anything seemed possible, even destroying the marriage of someone you've never met.

Kissing Dead Girls

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."

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.

Why Things Burn

Poems

This Lambda Literary Award nominee is a book of fierce, original poetry by one of San Francisco's leading poets and performers.

Educated without being didactic, lyrical without being doggerel, passionate without being over the top and sexy without being prurient, Why Things Burn is everything poetry should be, without many of the things that poetry unfortunately is. These pieces work both in performance and on the page. They tackle sexuality, lesbian issues, rape, modern urban living, and the author's Jewish heritage, with a sometimes kooky but always sophisticated view of life.

Dear Dawn

Aileen Wuornos in Her Own Words

The chilling autobiography of Aileen Wuornos, the notorious female serial killer who was the subject of an Investigation Discovery special and the Oscar-winning film starring Charlize Theron, Monster

Between 1989 and 1990, Aileen Wuornos, a hitchhiking prostitute, shot, killed, and robbed seven men in remote Florida locations. Arrested in 1991, she was condemned to death on six separate counts and executed by lethal injection in 2002.

An abused runaway who turned to prostitution to survive, Wuornos has become iconic of vengeful women who lash out at the nearest target. She has also become a touchstone for women’s, prostitutes’, and prisoners’ rights advocates. Her story has inspired myriad books and articles, as well as the 2003 movie Monster, for which Charlize Theron won an Academy Award. But until now, Wuornos’s uncensored voice has never been heard.

Dear Dawn is Wuornos’s autobiography, culled from her ten-year death row correspondence with beloved childhood friend Dawn Botkins. Authorized for publication by Wuornos and edited under the guidance of Botkins, the letters not only offer Wuornos’s riveting reflections on the murders, legal battles, and media coverage, but go further, revealing her fears and obsessions, her rich humor and empathy, and her gradual disintegration as her execution approached. A candid life story told to a trusted friend, Dear Dawn is a compelling narrative, unwaveringly true to its source.

“It is both empowering and heartbreaking, because Wuornos represents the fury of a wronged girl-gone-wild, whose rage was unleashed on men.” —The Rumpus