Permit Me To Write My Own Ending
Now available from Write Bloody Press
Permit Me to Write My Own Ending is a collection spanning generations and timescapes - from gritty, defiant explorations of a London adolescence, to haunting poems detailing love and adulthood in the US. Faulkner’s language and form dissects the emotional impact of historical trauma, navigating and sharply reframing nationality and memory, interiority and history. Depictions of London during the Blitz and post-war Berlin sit alongside poems about motherhood and childhood from the perspective of one of Freud’s most famous patients. In this defiant debut collection, the act of writing boldly confronts a landscape dominated by patriarchal notions of the female, deftly redefining it with language and vivid imagery. Faulkner unapologetically writes her own ending.
Rebecca is a London-born poet based in Brooklyn. The author of Permit Me to Write My Own Ending, (Write Bloody Publishing, 2023) her work appears in New York Quarterly, The Maine Review, The Poetry Society of New York, CALYX Press, Berkeley Poetry Review, and elsewhere.
She is the winner of Black Fox Literary Magazine’s 2023 Writing Contest, the 2022 winner of Sand Hills Literary Magazine’s National Poetry Contest, and the 2021 Grand Prize winner of the Prometheus Unbound Poetry Competition. Rebecca was a finalist for the 2024 Claire Keyes Poetry Award, the 2023 Mslexia Poetry Competition, the 2023 Desert Rat Poetry Prize, the 2022 Patricia Cleary Miller Award for Poetry, the 2022 American Literary Review Poetry Contest, and the 2021 Foster Poetry Prize. Her work has been anthologized in the Best New British and Irish Poets 2019-2021, nominated for Best of the Net and a Pushcart Prize.
In 2021 Rebecca was a Poetry Fellow at the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts. In 2022 she joined a cohort of poets and artists at a fall residency at the Kolaj Institute in New Orleans. In June 2023 she was writer-in-residence at the Juniper Institute, UMass, Amherst. In January 2024 she was writer-in-residence at Prospect Street Writers House in Bennington, VT. Rebecca holds a BA in English Literature & Theatre Studies from the University of Leeds, an MA in Performance Studies from NYU, and a Ph.D. in Cultural Studies from the University of London. She is the recipient of a 2023 poetry grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund for Women.
Her debut collection of poetry was published in the US and UK in March 2023 by Write Bloody Press UK, with tour announcements on the Events page. She is currently at work on her second collection of poetry, which engages with the life and work of five mid-century women artists.
“My Sadness Is Very Particular” from Permit Me to Write My Own Ending (Write Bloody Press, 2023)
“Last Rites” from Permit Me To Write My Own Ending, Reading at Libreria Bookshop, London, Summer 2023