The Center for Literary Arts is pleased to present Brittany Perham reading from her memoir, Executrix.  This event takes place on Thursday, February 25, 2027 at SJSU Student Union Theater at 7 PM. 

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Executrix begins with a mystery: Why would the author’s father, from whom she had been estranged for more than a decade, change his will in the weeks before his death to make her the executor of his estate? Executrix charts the process of sorting out the business of this indebted estate using the language of real estate foreclosure, income tax audits, and medical records. The executor transforms the disjointed details of a life into a tidy financial narrative that meets the demands of claimants; the writer transforms the disjointed details of a life into a story that meets the demands of memory. Through this twin accounting, Perham asks the big questions: What are the implications of being the child of an alcoholic? How do we reconcile memories that are fragmented, elided, or nonexistent? And what does it mean to write true “nonfiction”? With surprising humor, real tenderness, and, above all, a daring formal inventiveness, Executrix launches a critical investigation into family stories and secrets, and the genre of memoir itself.

Brittany Perham is the author of Double Portrait (W.W. Norton), which won the Barnard Women Poets Prize and was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award; The Curiosities (Free Verse Editions); and, with Kim Addonizio, the collaborative word/art project The Night Could Go in Either Direction (SHP). Her writing has received support from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the Hemingway House, the James Merrill House Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, the Wallace Stegner Fellowship Program, and Yaddo. Recent work in poetry and prose may be found or is forthcoming in The Cortland Review, Gulf Coast, Poetry, and Prairie Schooner. She teaches English and Creative Writing at Endicott College, and lives in Massachusetts and San Francisco. Her memoir, Executrix (University of Georgia Press), won the 2025 AWP Sue William Silverman Prize for Creative Nonfiction.  

This event is made possible thanks to the support of the Lewandowski Family Foundation, and the College of Humanities and the Arts' Artist Excellence Programming Grant.