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White Brown by Kayla Pica Williams

Name: White Brown by Kayla Pica Williams
SKU: 140239
Availability: InStock

Original price was: $17.99.Current price is: $15.99.

This book will keep you off balance, in all the best ways. This book is about being off balance. Kayla Pica Williams explores what it means to code-switch, to inhabit multiple selves, to be at home in any of them or maybe at home in none of them. The line between lyric and narrative blurs as the collection runs up against the limits of language and syntax’s ability to render complex truths about racial and multiracial identity in America. Who is self? Who is other? “I don’t have the words for that,” Williams writes, but this lovely book depicts with deep care the author’s attempt to find them.

–Amorak Huey, author of Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy

“Is there a way to summarize my skin tone through sighs?” asks Kayla Pica Williams in White Brown. A chapbook haunted with pointed longing, Williams’ debut exhales an embodied study of the metrics and logics of naming as claiming. If poetry carries interiority across the passage between ourselves and the world, Williams’ writing blanches at acts of translation: song, tongue, teeth lit so hard they come up blank, phantoms you feel for their absence. Know that any white page bound here was likely bleached of brown. Know that was meant to make reading easier. Know that is Williams’ medium and context.

–Douglas Kearney

Categories: Advance Orders, Bookstore

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White Brown

by Kayla Pica Williams

Paper

$15.99 List: ~~$17.99~~

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This title will be released on August 15, 2025

One moment you’re too white to understand, the next you’re brown enough to be claimed. Kayla Pica Williams brings the bicultural experience alive. Pica is pulled between the white mainstream culture and brown Peruvian heritage, struggling to find identity in a world where the expectations of others often limits diversity of expression. She fearlessly engages issues of immigrant life while utilizing various experimental forms to discuss the intricacies of multicultural trauma, erosion of familial traditions, the complications of teaching across ethnic boundaries, and communicating through hostile language barriers.

#immigrants #bicultural #Peruvian #American #poetry

Kayla Pica Williams is a fifth year in her English with a creative writing emphasis PhD at ISU. She obtained her masters from CalArts and has published several short pieces in Stirling Lit, Club Plum, Unlikely Stories, Setu Magazine, ionosphere, Rigorous, and Rosette Maleficarum, a novella in Big Fiction Magazine and a play in Open: Journal Arts and Letters. She is a second-generation Peruvian American who enjoys long walks with her King Charles and teaches at University of Illinois Urbana Champaign. Find her @KaylaPicaWilliams.bsky.social