The Cyborg Jillian Weise
B. 1981
The Cyborg Jillian Weise was born in Houston, Texas. Cy's first poetry collection, The Amputee’s Guide to Sex (2007), was re-issued in a 10th anniversary edition by Soft Skull Press. Cy was awarded a Fulbright fellowship to Argentina where she wrote the speculative novel The Colony (2010). Returning to poetry, Cy wrote The Book of Goodbyes (2013) which won the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets and the Isabella Gardner Award from BOA Editions. Her fourth book, Cyborg Detective (2019), includes page poems that become screen poems, such as "Confession." It won the 2020 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award. Anthony Madrid writes of the book, "Here--and almost nowhere else in American poetry--we have an anarchic sharp-fanged satirist of the very first rank." Disabled publisher Red Mare Press released Cy's chapbook, Give It to Alfie Tonight (2020).
During the pandemic, Cy started Borg 4 Borg Productions with the video play A Kim Deal Party. It screened at Public Space One in Iowa City and features a cast of 87 writers and 24 bands. Cy's essays, on being an actual cyborg, have appeared in The New York Times and Granta. Her memoir, Common Cyborg, is forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.