De Amerikaanse schrijfster Rita Ann Bullwinkel werd geboren op 2 september 1988 in Stanford, California. Rita Bullwinkel is bekend is om haar debuutroman” Headshot” uit 2024, die op de longlist stond voor de Booker Prize van 2024. Ze is ook de auteur van de bundel korte verhalen “Belly Up” uit 2018, die in 2022 een Whiting Award kreeg.Bullwinkle is professor aan de Universiteit van San Francisco, waar ze creatief schrijven doceert. Haar andere werken zijn verschenen in literaire tijdschriften, waaronder The White Review, BOMB, NOON en Guernica. In 2024 werd Bullwinkel redacteur van het literaire tijdschrift McSweeney’s Quarterly, nadat ze sinds 2016 als hoofdredacteur had gewerkt.
Uit: Headshot
“The industrial bulbs of Bob’s Boxing Palace cast omnipresent white like the lighting seen in theaters. In stage acting, makeup must be twice as caked to even show up to the eyes of the audience. Because of this, in this washed-out ring of light, Rose Mueller and Tanya Maw both look like they have monochrome white faces. Rose Mueller’s hair is cut so short that you can barely see it under her headgear. Tanya Maw has woven her long hair into two looped braids. Her ovals of hair stick out of her headgear and place droopy circles on her back. Tanya Maw has her shoulders pulled forward over the center of her spine. Tanya Maw pushes her hands towards Rose Mueller and Rose Mueller moves her own hands to greet them. They’re not clapping, but their hands are smacking each other in rhythm. Tanya Maw can hear clapping rhymes as her fists touch the fists of Rose Mueller. I’m an actor, says Tanya Maw, in her head, to herself. Tanya Maw needs to play the part of the winner.
* * *
The most famous hand-clapping game Tanya Maw knows is the one about the tugboat, where the last line of every verse morphs from a normal word into a crude trick. Tanya Maw used to love this game, although now, at seventeen, she is decidedly too old to play it. There had been something wonderful about listening to even her best, most well-behaved classmates put words in their mouths that changed mid-breath from banal to naughty. The words had changed while still lodged in their throats. She could see the words themselves shape-shifting, the strangeness of the word ask changing into ass, a fly bug changing into a crotch-covering zipper. As a young girl, playing hand-clapping games for hours on end, Tanya Maw had seen small, one-inch sculptures of the morphing words on the tongues of her playmates. When her playmates got to the end of a verse, she could see the sculpture of the word remold itself from something boring into something forbidden, and then these forbidden word sculptures were spit out into a pile on the pavement between the two girls who were at play. The more verses the girls got through, the more forbidden word sculptures they made. In those early days of girlhood there were piles of these sculptures all over the playground. It was a graveyard of hand-clapping games that had been played earlier that day. Tanya Maw has never met Rose Mueller before, but the way that Rose is clenching on her mouth guard makes Tanya think Rose is about to spit out a forbidden word sculpture. There is something foul inside the mouth of Rose Mueller.”
Rita Bullwinkel (Stanford, 2 september 1988)
