Brittany Perham

Brittany Perham (Grad ’06) was selected by Claudia Rankine to win the 2016 Barnard Women Poets Prize for her book, Double Portrait.  Perham is a Jones Lecturer in the creative writing program at Stanford University. “It is a huge honor that Double Portrait was chosen by Claudia Rankine,” she says, noting that she taught Rankine’s work in three classes in the past year. Perham describes the poems in her collection as investigations of the relationship to an “other,” linking portraits of lover and beloved, citizen and country, living and dead. As such, she says, “[t]he poems find forms that prioritize mirroring and refrain.” She is currently working on a manuscript of linked prose poems and a memoir-in-essays about managing her relationship to her father (and his legal and financial affairs) after his death.