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
PRAISE:
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
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