Daughters of the Minotaur is a lyrical, subversive collection of poems inspired by the lives and work of five visionary twentieth-century women artists: Eva Hesse, Leonora Carrington, Francesca Woodman, Ana Mendieta, and Helen Martins. Blending these imagined conversations with poems drawn from her own experience, Faulkner creates a rich dialogue across generations, reclaiming voices too often overlooked.
Exploring visibility, artistic ambition, migration, motherhood, aging, mental illness, and the enduring struggle for creative freedom, these poems challenge the patriarchal narratives that have shaped both art and womanhood. Intimate, inventive, and fiercely feminist, Daughters of the Minotaur reimagines the boundaries between biography, memory, and myth.
A luminous celebration of women who transformed art—and a powerful reminder that their voices continue to reshape the world.
Advance praise for Daughters of the Minotaur:
If you follow the word “knife” through this labyrinth, you’ll cut a path through wilds of feminist making and remaking. By turns trenchant and lavish, Faulkner’s poems are in dynamic conversation with visionary artists, dissecting the vulnerable, perilous and impassioned conditions of embodiment that define women’s lives. In language-matter that is lexically rich and grammatically inventive, Faulkner is heir to Plath and Woolf; wielding her own medium as an incisive blade.
—B.K. Fischer, author of Ceive
To be an artist–to be a woman, a mother–requires (self)-violence, even murder. Like Virginia Woolf slaying the “Angel of the House,” these women artists must do battle with the Minotaur, beastly patriarch and master of the maze of contrary instincts. As a writer, Faulkner lives this. These fierce poems bristle with jarring and resonant imagery; bulletins from the front, fraught with angst and hope and power.
—Ivy Schweitzer, author of Dividing Rivers
Rebecca Faulkner is a London-born poet based in Brooklyn. The author of Permit Me to Write My Own Ending, (Write Bloody Publishing, 2023) her work appears in New York Quarterly,The Maine Review, The Poetry Society of New York, CALYX Press, Berkeley Poetry Review, and elsewhere.
She was the winner of Black Fox Literary Magazine’s 2023 Writing Contest, and the 2022 winner of Sand Hills Literary Magazine’s National Poetry Contest. Rebecca was a finalist for the 2025 Princemere Poetry Prize, and was awarded Second Place Prize in the 2025 Streetlight Magazine Poetry Contest. She was a finalist for the 2024 American Literary Review Poetry Award, the 2024 Claire Keyes Poetry Award, the 2023 Mslexia Poetry Competition, and the 2023 Desert Rat Poetry Prize.. She was a semifinalist for the 2024 Gearhart Poetry Prize, and an International Merit Award winner in the Atlanta Review’s 2024 Poetry Competition. She has received Honorable Mentions for the 2024 Common Ground Review Poetry Prize and has been anthologized in the Best New British and Irish Poets 2019-2021. Rebecca was nominated in 2025 and 2022 for Best of the Net, and in 2022 for a Pushcart Prize.
Rebecca holds a BA in English Literature & Theatre Studies from the University of Leeds, an MA in Performance Studies from NYU, and a Ph.D. in Cultural Studies from the University of London. She is the recipient of a 2023 poetry grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund for Women. In 2021 she was a Poetry Fellow at the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts.
Her collection, Permit Me to Write My Own Ending was published in the US and UK in March 2023 by Write Bloody Publishing, and was a finalist for the New England Poetry Club’s 2024 Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize.
Her new collection, Daughters of the Minotaur, is a lyrical, subversive collection of poems inspired by the lives and work of five visionary twentieth-century women artists. It was long-listed for the C & R Press Poetry Award; a finalist for the Gasher Press Book Prize; and named the winner of the 2025 Terry J. Cox Poetry Prize. It is forthcoming from Regal House Publishing on May 12, 2027.