Alex Poppe – författare

Dress-obsessed and directionless, 44-year-old Alex Poppe can’t get her life together. A business analyst, turned actor, turned teacher, she works a dead-end marketing job under a mammary gland-fixated man and still waits tables to make ends meet. A chance encounter with an acclaimed journalist encourages her to accept a teaching position in northern Iraq, which charms with a heart and a fist.Dining with a pistol-packing hitman, being thrown off the back of a truck during a humanitarian aid drop, and unknowingly working alongside one of Sweden’s most notorious sex offenders are colored-glass pieces of information that fall together in a turn, educating Alex in Kurdish culture and politics beyond what her students teach her in the classroom and what she experiences as a Western woman living in the Middle East. There are earthquakes and building fires and a small war juxtaposed against the senseless, drug-fueled death of a good friend and the bone chilling aftermath of the security police’s investigation. Alex navigates teaching online during the COVID lockdown with the help of WhatsApp before her father’s unexpected passing pushes her to return to the US.Blending memoir, personal essay, local topography, and culture, Breakfast Wine is a frank, human story of pursuing an unconventional life and finding a way home.

Sixteen-year-old Lava lives peacefully enough with her imperfect mother, Lila, and their boarder, Cody, an Iraqi war vet suffering from PTSD. Lava''s ex-addict father, Jesse, is released from prison, and Lava''s life in Detroit is upended when Jesse pressures Lava for her urine so he can pass his mandatory drug tests. After an altercation, Lava is sent to live with her mother''s cousin Lola in Seville. Lola is a larger-than-life flamenco dancer who teaches Lava the language of flamenco dance; Lava''s life opens outward as she becomes fluent in flamenco''s structure, giving her new modes of expression as she experiences first love, friendship, and betrayal, and uncovers family secrets. Rich with lyrical, sensual prose, Duende is a coming-of-age novella about mothers and daughters, about legacy, about self-expression, about defining a way to live.

Alex Poppe’s characters celebrate the fragile grandeur of living an independent life in the aftermath of violence. Deeply rooted in place, these stories are about identity, hope, and redemption as fierce and flawed women rebuild their lives in the wake of war. The young women sparking through these pages are surprising, funny, and devastating: the essence of womanhood.The title piece, “Jinwar,” is a funny, yet heartbreaking story of an American woman who survived rape in the military, was denied due process, and found herself working in a food truck shaped like a hot dog during the Kavanaugh hearings.Her struggle to rebuild her life takes her across the globe to the Middle East, to Jinwar, an all-female village in Rojava, northeastern Syria. Here, survivors of war, patriarchy, and genocide un-make violence and search for ways to heal.Timely and prescient, Jinwar is a story for the #YesAllWoman world.