Kevin Killian

Kevin Killian (born 1952)^[1] is an American poet, author, and playwright of primarily LGBT literature.^[2] He is also a highly regarded editor.^[3] My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer, which he co-edited with Peter Gizzi, won the American Book Award for poetry in 2009.^[4] His novel, Impossible Princess, won the 2010 Lambda Literary Award as the best gay erotic fiction work of 2009.^[5]

Killian is also co-founder of the Poets Theater, an influential poetry, stage, and performance group based in San Francisco.^[6]

Life and career

He was raised Roman Catholic.^[7] He attended a Roman Catholic parochial school run by Franciscan monks, where he suffered what he has described as routine abuse.^[8] He discussed these experiences in an essay in the edited work Wrestling With the Angel, which describes 21 gay men's experiences with religion.^[9] He was also the New York City spelling bee champion.^[10] He attended graduate school at the State University of New York at Stony Brook (SUNY-Stony Brook) in the 1970s, and moved to San Francisco in 1980.^[7][11] Although he is gay and Dodie Bellamy is a lesbian, the couple married and have an active heterosexual sex life.^[1] Bellamy has written publicly about their marriage and sex life, and both individuals have discussed the large size of Killian's penis in their writing.^[1] Killian admired the work of JT LeRoy (later to be revealed as the pen name and persona of author Laura Albert), and held public readings of LeRoy's work in 2000.^[12]

As a beginning novelist, he tied for first place in the "Hamming Up Hammett" Dashiell Hammett bad writing contest in San Francisco in 1988.^[13] Author Dodie Bellamy featured him as a partially fictional character in her vampire novel, The Letters of Mina Harker.^[14] His poetry has appeared in the anthology The Best American Poetry 1988, the magazine Discontents, and the anthology Good Times: Bad Trips.^[15] He once based an entire volume of poetry on the work of horror film director Dario Argento^[16] (motivated to do so as a response to the AIDS epidemic).^[7] He also helped author Alvin Orloff polish chapters of his novel Gutterboys.^[17] Noted author Edmund White, writing in The New York Times, described his work as "a kind of mandarin American casualness that is peculiar to ... West Coast writers ... a school of refined but deceptively offhand stylists."^[18] The Village Voice called My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer, which he co-edited with Peter Gizzi, "impeccably edited".^[3] The work was also highly praised by The New York Times.^[19]

His 2009 collection of short gay erotic fiction, Impossible Princess, won the Lambda Literary Foundation Award for best gay men's erotica.^[5] It was his third collection of short fiction.^[20]

Killian is founder and former director of Small Press Traffic.^[21] He now edits the poetry 'zine Mirage.^[22]

Poets Theater and retrospective work

Killian also has some acting experience. His interest in theatre emerged in the early 1980s when he saw experimental plays by Carla Harryman.^[23] Harryman and Tom Mandel subsequently cast him in their play, Fist of the Colossus.^[7] He co-founded the Poets Theater in San Francisco,^[6] and has acted in as well as written pieces for staging by the group.^[23] As of 2001, he had written 31 plays.^[7] He co-authored the performance art piece The Red and the Green in 2005 with cinemtographer Karla Milosevich.^[24] In 2009, Killian and David Brazil co-edited a collection of Poets Theater pieces, The Kenning Anthology of Poets Theatre: 1945-1985.^[6]

Killian is also active in bringing attention to important LGBTQ artists and writers of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. He has held poetry readings of a wide number of influential poets and writers, and participated in a number of panels, art installations, retrospectives, and memorials. For example, in 2008 he was a featured speaker at a University of Maine "Poetry of the 1970s" conference.^[25] He and artist Colter Jacobsen also helped organize a major tribute to the Kiki Gallery ("Kiki: The Proof Is in the Pudding"), a highly influential art gallery in San Francisco in the 1980s which featured the work of LGBTQ artists.^[26]

Published works

Story and poetry collections

• Little Men (Hard Press, 1996)
• Argento Series (Krupskaya, 2001)
• I Cry Like a Baby (Painted Leaf Press, 2001)
• Action Kylie (ingirumimusnocteetconsumimurigni, 2008)
• Impossible Princess (City Lights Publishers, 2009)

Novels

• Shy (The Crossing Press, 1989)
• Bedrooms Have Windows (Amethyst Press, 1989)
• Arctic Summer (Masquerade Books, 1997)
• Spread Eagle (Alyson Books, 2010)

Biographies

• Poet Be Like God (co-written with Lewis Ellingham; Wesleyan University Press, 1998)

Edited works

• The Wild Creatures by Sam D'Allesandro (Suspect Thoughts Press, 2005)
• My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer (co-edited with Peter Gizzi; Wesleyan University Press, 2008)
• The Kenning Anthology of Poets Theater: 1945-1985 (co-edited with David Brazil; Kenning Editions, 2010)

Plays

• Stone Marmalade (co-written with Leslie Scalapino; Singing Horse Press, 1996)
• Often (co-written with Barbara Guest; Kenning Editions, 2001)
• Island of Lost Souls (Nomados, 2004)

References

External links

• Links to online works by Kevin Killian. Hosted by University of Buffalo