Performance Anxiety

Spiky and offbeat, Summer's Performance Anxiety collages hybrid texts in a dazzling mosaic of self, race and adoption.

Standing atop the line between fact and fiction, life and livelihood, actor and audience, the work in Performance Anxiety examines love, lust, duty, and destruction in a world without a backstage, and where the curtain never goes down.

Sullivan Summer is an American, domestic, transracial adoptee and adoptee advocate. Her writing focuses on themes of race, adoption, identity reclamation, US history, politics, and pop culture. Sullivan is a past participant of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Cave Canem, Tin House Workshop, Yale Writers' Workshop, and is a graduate of the Brooklyn Poets Mentorship Program. Her poetry, essays, and hybrid work has been published in The Plentitudes, Redivider, and the Bacopa Literary Review (among other publications). Her first full-length collection, Vexology, was a current semi-finalist for the YesYes Books Pamet River Prize. She lives in New York City.