Sam D'Allesandro

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Sam D’Allesandro, born Richard Anderson in 1956, studied at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and came to San Francisco as a youth in the early 1980s. He began as a poet and published a book of elegant lyrics called Slippery Sins. Soon he fell in with the so-called "New Narrative" writers Robert Glück, Bruce Boone, Steve Abbott and others. He reached out to other like-minded writers and contacted Dennis Cooper, Kathy Acker, Benjamin Weissman, David Trinidad, and Dodie Bellamy, with whom he began an epistolary collaboration she was later to publish as Real: The Letters of Mina Harker and Sam D’Allesandro. At the peak of his powers, he began to feel ill. He died of AIDS in 1988, leaving behind a body of work that ranges from stories of one paragraph only to fully developed novellas. He is also the author of The Wild Creatures, which was published posthumously in 2005.

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• Hear editor Kevin Killian reading from D'Allesandro's work on KQED's "The Writers' Block"