Join the College of Arts and Sciences and The Department of English for the Bash Lectures in Modern American Literature
Rebecca Lehmann is a novelist, essayist, and award-winning poet. She has an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a Maytag Fellow. She is the author of three collections of poetry: Between the Crackups; Ringer, winner of the AWP Donald Hall Prize (selected by Ross Gay); and The Sweating Sickness. Her writing has appeared in American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, NPR’s The Slowdown, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day. She lives in Indiana with her family, where she is an associate professor of English and Gender and Women’s Studies at Saint Mary’s College.
Lehmann’s newest book The Beheading Game is a feminist, alternate-history novel revisioning Anne Boleyn’s execution as a revenge narrative in which Anne escapes the Tower of London, sews her head back on, then sets out on a quest to kill Henry VIII before he can marry her own lady-in-waiting Jane Seymour.
A fantastical journey through the wilds of England and Tudor history, filled with danger and magic and steeped in Arthurian legend, The Beheading Game is a prescient reminder that “mouthy” women have always been punished. Now, thanks to debut novelist Rebecca Lehmann, nearly five hundred years after Anne Boleyn’s death, one of history’s most maligned women finally has the chance to tell her story.