Home » Dear Herculine – Editor’s Pick

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 intersex Herculine Barbin’s memoirs, discovered and re-published by Michel Foucault. The medical reassignment of Herculine’s gender eventually led to their 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.