The one who remains to tell the story — the "final girl" — is the last girl left alive in this bracing cycle of poems that draw on slasher movies, captivity fantasies, queer theory, and death from breast cancer. Sexy and tart, low-down and high-hearted poems such as Suture, Slash, Vamp, and Bride of Reanimator articulate the dark desires, fears, and traumas out of which pop culture is made. Author Daphne Gottlieb is the winner of the 2002 Firecracker Award and a 2002 Lambda Finalist.
San Francisco-based Performance Poet Daphne Gottlieb stitches together the ivory tower and the gutter just using her tongue. She is the author and editor of nine books, most recently the poetry book 15 Ways to Stay Alive as well as co-editor (with Lisa Kester) of Dear Dawn: Aileen Wuornos in her Own Words.? She is the editor of F**king Daphne: Mostly True Stories and Fictions and Homewrecker: An Adultery Reader, as well as the author of the poetry books Kissing Dead Girls, Final Girl, Why Things Burn and Pelt, and as the graphic novel Jokes and the Unconscious with artist Diane DiMassa.
Final Girl was the winner of the Audre Lorde Award in Poetry for 2003 from Publishing Triangle. Additionally, Final Girl was named one of the The Village Voice's Favorite Books of 2003, and received rave reviews from Publisher's Weekly, The San Francisco Chronicle and The Village Voice. Why Things Burn was the winner of a 2001 Firecracker Alternative Book Award (Special Recognition -- Spoken Word) and was also a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for 2001. Her work has been translated into Turkish and Greek, and has inspired theatrical adaptations and DJ-remixes.
Recent press has praised her work as "fierce," "unapologetic," "scorching" and "deliriously gutsy." She has been widely published in journals including The Utne Reader, Tikkun, nerve.com, mcsweeney's.net, Exquisite Corpse and Instant City. Her work has appeared in a number of anthologies including Live Through This: The Art of Self-Destruction, Word Warriors: 35 Women Leaders of the Spoken Word Revolution, Don't Forget to Write!, Half Life: Jew-ish Tales from Interfaith Homes, With a Rough Tongue: Femmes Write Porn and Short Fuse: A Contemporary Anthology of Global Performance Poetry. She is also the cover girl on San Francisco Noir (Akashic Books, 2005).
Besides anchoring three national performance poetry tours, featuring with Maggie Estep, Hal Sirowitz and Lydia Lunch, Gottlieb has also appeared across the country with the Slam America bus tour and with notorious all-girl wordsters Sister Spit. She has performed at festivals coast-to-coast, including South by Southwest, Bumbershoot, and Ladyfest Bay Area.
Until 2006, she served as the poetry editor of the online queer literary magazine Lodestar Quarterly. She also was the poetry editor of Other Magazine and a co-organizer of ForWord Girls, the first spoken word festival for anyone who is, has been or will be a girl, which was held in September 2002.
Gottlieb teaches graduate-level creative writing, and has also performed and taught creative writing workshops at all levels around the country. She received her MFA from Mills College.
