Dear Herculine (Sawtooth Poetry Prize Series)

Poetry. LGBT Studies. Winner of the 2014 Sawtooth Poetry Prize, selected by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge. A book- length epistolary collection of hybrid-, trans-, and inter-genre prose, DEAR HERCULINE is an intertextual project that recalls portions of the 19th-century French hermaphrodite Herculine Barbin's memoirs, discovered and re- published by Michel Foucault. The medical reassignment of Herculine's gender eventually led to his/her death in February of 1868. Herculine's experiences are set against and interwoven into the author's experiences as an intersexed body through the epistolary form.