Poppy Z. Brite

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Image:PoppyZBrite Potter2.jpg Poppy Z. Brite (born Melissa Ann Brite on May 25, 1967) is an American author born in New Orleans. Early in her career, she was best known for writing gothic and horror novels and short stories. Her trademarks have included using gay men as main characters, graphic sexual descriptions in the works, and an often wry treatment of gruesome events. Some of her better known novels are Lost Souls, Drawing Blood, and Exquisite Corpse; she has also released short fiction collections: Swamp Foetus (also published as Wormwood), Are You Loathsome Tonight? (also published as Self-Made Man), Wrong Things (with Caitlin R. Kiernan), and The Devil You Know. She has also written a biography about singer Courtney Love.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s she has largely moved away from horror fiction while still writing about gay (but more realistic) characters. Her critically acclaimed novels Liquor (2004), Prime (2005), and Soul Kitchen (forthcoming in 2006) are dark comedies set in the New Orleans restaurant world. (Brite has been married to a chef for 16 years.) Her short novel The Value of X and several stories in her most recent collection The Devil You Know revisit the characters from Liquor and chronicle the lives of the Stubbs family, a Catholic clan whose roots are sunk deep in the traditional culture of New Orleans. Brite plans to write at least two more novels in the Liquor series, Dead Shrimp Blues and Hurricane Stew.

In 2002-2003, a screenplay adaptation of Exquisite Corpse was co-written by Max Krueger and Robert St. Mary Template:Ref. The script was registered with the Writers' Guild of America. Krueger, St. Mary and Flo Speakman saught to produce Exquisite Corpse as an independent film to be shot on location in New Orleans, but the funding failed to materializeTemplate:Ref.

Born a biological female, Brite has written and talked much about her gender dysphoria/gender identity issues. She claims to identify as male more than female but makes no attempt to dress or appear male and also does not expect to be referred to as "he"Template:Ref.

During Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Brite at first opted to stay at home, but she eventually relocated 80 miles away to her mother's home in Mississippi. She continued to update her fans regarding the situation, including the unknown status of her house and pets, on her blogTemplate:Ref, and has since become one of the first 100,000 New Orleanians to begin repopulating the city.

A critical essay on Brite's fiction appears in The Evolution of the Weird Tale (2004) by S. T. Joshi.

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