REBBECCA BROWN reads from her novel THEY BECOME HER and PATTY SEYBURN reads from her poetry collection PERFECTA

They Become Her (What Books)                                                  

Perfecta (What Books)

Join us tonight for the fall launch party for one of Skylight Books' favorite local presses, What Books!

Rebbecca Brown's debut novel, They Become Her, received Honorable Mention in the 2009-2010 Starcherone Innovative Fiction contest. It tells the story of Delia Bacon, the first to propose that Shakespeare did not write his own works and whose own literary ambition inspired a life filled with fame and scandal. Three fictional biographies of contemporary writers--all sharing the name Rebbecca Brown--become involved in Delia's quest, complicating who is writing whose fictional biography. They Become Her is poetically rich, provocatively questioning identity, the relationships between texts and their authors, and the predicaments in which many artists inevitably find themselves. It invites a self-reflexive entanglement with the reader, who won't be able to resist playing along to the unexpected end.

Smart and funny, gorgeous and frightened. Whether at the racetrack or in the cul-de-sac. Asking questions of the flawed self or of the idyllic, Patty Seyburn's poems look headlong at the living world and use all of it. The poems are winding and discursive but also include short, eye-rolling lyrics. Dinner party politics join with lines from Hass, the Bible, and the memory of Detroit. Characters in Seyburn's poems do what we all do, only with the skepticism of Plato.

Rebbecca Brown received her Ph.D. in Creative Writing from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette in 2007. Her work has appeared in journals such as American Literary Review, Confrontation, 88: A Journal of Contemporary American Poetry, Eclipse, Requited, H_ngm_n and Ekleksographia. She received an Honorable Mention from the Academy of American Poets, the Rachel Sherwood Prize for Poetry, First Place in the LACC Writing Contest for Creative Nonfiction, and has taught as a Fulbright-Nehru Visiting Lecturer at Kannur University in Kerala, India. THEY BECOME HER is her first novel. She lives in New York City and teaches at Hunter College.

Patty Seyburn has published four books of poems, Perfeccta (What Books, 2014), Hilarity (New Issues Press, 2009), Mechanical Cluster (Ohio State University Press, 2002), and Diasporadic (Helicon Nine Editions, 1998). She teaches at California State University, Long Beach, and co-edits Pool: A Journal of Poetry.