Amber Dawn
Personal Information
Description
Amber Dawn is the author of the novels Sodom Road Exit (2018) and Sub Rosa (winner of a Lambda Literary Award, 2010), the Vancouver Book Award-winning memoir How Poetry Saved My Life (2013), the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize-nominated poetry collection Where the words end and my body begins (2015). She is also editor of Fist of the Spider Woman: Tales of Fear and Queer Desire and co-editor of With a Rough Tongue: Femmes Write Porn. She teaches creative writing at Douglas College in Vancouver, and also leads several low-barrier community writing classes.
Books
Hustling Verse
In this trailblazing anthology, more than fifty self-identified sex workers from all walks of the industry (survival and trade, past and present) explore their lived experience through the expressive nuance and beauty of poetry. In a variety of forms ranging from lyrics to list poems to found poetry to hybrid works, these authors express themselves with the complexity, agency, and honesty that sex workers are rarely afforded. Contributors from Canada, the US, Europe, and Asia include Gregory Scofield, Tracy Quan, Summer Wright, and Akira the Hustler. As an antidote to the invasive and often biased media depictions of sex workers, Hustling Verse is a fiercely groundbreaking exploration of intimacy, transactional sex, identity, healing, and resilience.
Sodom Road exit
Bailey Enrica Martin has to return to live with her mother after dropping out of university. Soon strange things begin to happen: a mysterious and salacious force begins to dog her; inexplicable sounds in the night and unimaginable sites spotted in the periphery.
Fist of the Spider Woman
Traditional horror has often portrayed female characters in direct relation to their sexual role according to men, such as the lascivious victim or innocent heroine; even vampy, powerful female villains, such as the classic noir "spider women," use their sexual prowess to seduce and overwhelm married men. Fist of the Spider Woman is a revelatory anthology of horror stories by queer and transgressive women and others that disrupts reality as queer women know it, instilling both fear and arousal while turning traditional horror iconography on its head.In this collection, horror (including gothic, noir, and speculative writing) is defined as that which both titillates and terrorizes, forcing readers to confront who they are. Kristyn Dunnion's "Homeland" reveals the horrors that lurk in your average night at a lesbian bar; Elizabeth Bachinsky's "Postulation on the Violent Works of the Marquis de Sade" is a response to Sade from a feminist (yet kinky) perspective; and Amber Dawn's "Here Lies the Last Lesbian Rental" is a paranormal fantasia about urban gentrification, set in a house rented by lesbians on the eve that it is sold to new owners.Subversive, witty, sexy--and scary--Fist of the Spider Woman poses two questions