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Brynne Rebele-Henry

“I’m motivated by the lack of positive queer representation and lesbian writers in mainstream literature. I want to try to make queer women’s stories something that’s more universally read and accepted. I’m not interested in exploring the cause of homophobia, but rather in writing about the affects that it has on queer people.”

Winner of the AWP 2017 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry

Finalist for the 2019 Audre Lorde Award

 

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Brynne Rebele-Henry’s Prelude travels through time and space to commune with one of history’s great literary saints, St. Catherine of Sienna. As the two writers’ language braids together, so too does their loneliness, their prayer, their desperate and palpable yearning. “In the darkness, I whispered hymns like they could keep me,” begins one poem, and it’s as if both women are speaking at once. Prelude is richly researched and exquisitely rendered, an unforgettable collection.
— Kaveh Akbar
Raya and Sarah’s story is a credit to Rebele-Henry’s own teen voice, mature beyond her years. The emotionally dramatic narrative . . . rings incredibly true.
— NPR
The love between these two girls is the beating heart of this novel, and this romance combined with the intense masquerade they must constantly perform, ‘just pretending’ their feelings away, is where Rebele-Henry succeeds at portraying the aching duality of being queer in an environment that will not allow it . . . Orpheus Girl is a modern epic that helps us think about the older epics, and what they have still to offer us.
Chicago Review of Books
I learned early that beauty is violence, proclaims the speaker in Autobiography of a Wound. That a wound can speak for itself, and have its own personal history, is in and of itself an arresting idea. Brynne Rebele-Henry complicates that idea in poems that live and breathe in an adamant but prayerful darkness punctuated by small poppies, rosaries, white silk pants, sewing needles. Autobiography of a Wound is unafraid to stand at the edge of any precipice, and Rebele-Henry is unafraid to confront the darkness that lives in any crevice.
— Tarifa Faizullah
Teenage wunderkind Rebele-Henry fills her debut collection with fractured, polyvocal, visceral engagements with darkness and pain...
Publisher's Weekly
Wise, startling, often painful reading from a poet to watch.
Library Journal
 

Brynne Rebele-Henry is the author of the acclaimed YA novel, Orpheus Girl (Soho Press, 2019), which Kirkus Review called, “A bold, graphic tale about the costs of exclusion.” Orpheus Girl re-imagines the epic of Orpheus as a love story between two teen girls in rural Texas. Brynne is also an award-winning poet and author of the collections, Autobiography of a Wound (Pitt, 2018), winner of the AWP 2017 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, and Fleshgraphs (Nightboat Books, 2016), which was published when she was 16 years old, and was described by Publisher’s Weekly as “A visceral engagement with the politics and poetics of girlhood.” Her next collection of poetry is Prelude (Pitt, March 2022.)

Her fiction, poetry, and nonfiction has appeared in Denver Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, Fiction International, The Volta, Rookie, Adroit, PANK, Revolver, and So to Speak: A Feminist Journal of Language and Art. She has won numerous awards for her writing, including the 2016 Adroit Prize for Prose, the 2015 Louise Louis/Emily F. Bourne Award from the Poetry Society of America, and a 2017 Glenna Luschei Award from Prairie Schooner.



 

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