Atypical True Crime, Laughing at Offenders, and the Publishing Industry

which won the Eli Coppola Memorial Chapbook Prize, and River Candy (eohippus labs, 2015).Working as a traveling writer in the early 2010s, Gurba toured the USA with Sister Spit, a collective of radical, queer performance poets. 3 Sister Spit began in the 1990s as a women-only open mic night and, inspired by the punk movement, became a roadshow of touring poets and writers.Having been invited to tour with the collective in 2011 and 2015, Gurba took part in the revival era of Sister Spit, working and performing alongside authors such as Michelle Tea and Ali Liebegott.Touring as a writer was instrumental to the formation of Gurba's authorial voice, which fuses a compact poetic style with a gothic, grotesque, and surreal humor informed by the strategies of standup comedy.As she writes in Time on employing humor to write about sexual violence, humor enables her to resist what she refers to as a "pattern of storytelling [that] has come into vogue" and which has formed a "canon" with its own "script" for survivors of sexual violence (Gurba, "Why I Use Humor").This body of writing about surviving sexual violence, she argues, employs language in a manner that conveys the idea that "experiencing sexual violence is the worst moment in a survivor's life, period" ("Why I Use Humor").Writers in this canon, she asserts, "raid the vocabulary of religion in order to confer solemnity," and readers are asked to "'witness' a victim's pain as

Art · Art history · Criminology · Literature · Media studies · Political science · Publishing · Sociology · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · Irish and British Studies · Samuel Beckett and Modernism