Brenna Womer
Brenna Womer (she/they) is a queer, childfree, Latine prose writer and poet and an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at California State University, Fresno. She’s the author of the full-length, mixed-genre collections Unbrained (FlowerSong Press, 2023) and Honeypot (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019), as well as the chapbooks Atypical Cells of Undetermined Significance (C&R Press, 2018) and cost of living (Finishing Line Press, 2022). Her work has appeared in North American Review, Indiana Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Pinch, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere.
Brenna Womer’s latest cross-genre collection examines what Layli Long Soldier calls "unbrained things." In her poem "Head Count," Long Soldier names hormones, nursing, sleeping, night, and blood. In Womer’s collection, she adds shedding, shitting, birthing, fucking, flying, and more to the list.
In the titular hybrid essay, “Unbrained,” first published by Honey Literary, Womer considers her recent Bipolar diagnosis by a psychiatric nurse with whom she had a single appointment and never saw again. In the closing essay, “Thick Like Me,” which won NELLE’s Three Sister’s Prize for Creative Nonfiction, Womer grapples with a matrilineal legacy of relentless identity-seeking and what of her Mexican heritage she can claim after growing up in whitewashed familial spaces and on U.S. military bases.
In her poetry, prose, and hybrid work throughout, Womer interrogates ownership and indulges appetite; she presses through the softness of fur and fat to the hot core of animal innocence. On every page, she asks what’s fair but always comes up empty.