Antigone: Gaudy Sorrow with Barbara Seyda Book Reading

Join us for a reading on Friday, September 13th at 5pm. Antigone Books announces the release of Barbara Seyda’s GAUDY SORROW, a surreal, epistolary memoir about her Basque friend who died of Covid on Christmas Eve. A rant elegy swerving like a euphoric requiem, this queer Covid epic odyssey spews sexy rage and body parts like a swamp monster of grief – a hydra sprouting infinite heads from fresh wounds for the beloved. A female-centric opera and hybrid text, GAUDY SORROW flickers like a dead lightbulb, dazzling and bereft.

Just published by Finishing Line Press, 2024 and now available in-store for $20. Join us for an in-person reading/book launch this Friday, September 13th.

Barbara Seyda is a queer, Polish-American playwright, screenwriter, journalist and poet. Her published books are Women in Love (Bulfinch/Little Brown) winner of a Lambda Literary Award, Nomads of a Desert City (University of Arizona Press) and Celia, A Slave (Yale University Press) winner of the Yale Drama Prize. Currently Seyda’s collaborating with female, rap artist/composer Angel Haze on a new hip hop opera. She’s also working with award-winning, film director Olga Chajdas on a new screenplay Blood Soup, which cross-cuts between five children in Warsaw in 1942. She lives in Tucson, on the Sonoran Desert home of the Tohono O’odham people.