Kevin Killian

{{Short description|American poet, author, and playwright (1952–2019)}}

{{Infobox writer

| image = Killian Kevin by Daniel Nicoletta.jpeg

| imagesize =

| name = Kevin Killian

| caption =

| pseudonym =

| birth_date = {{birth date|1952|12|24}}

| birth_place = Smithtown, New York, U.S.

| death_date = {{death date and age|2019|6|15|1952|12|24}}

| death_place = San Francisco, California, U.S.

| occupation = {{flatlist|

}}

| genre = LGBT literature

| movement =

| debut works =

| influences =

| influenced =

| website =

| signature =

| spouse = Dodie Bellamy

| alma_mater = Fordham University
Stonybrook University

}}

Kevin Killian (December 24, 1952 – June 15, 2019){{Cite web|last=Bellamy|first=Dodie|date=June 20, 2000|title=My Mixed Marriage|url=https://www.villagevoice.com/2000/06/20/my-mixed-marriage/|website=Village Voice}} was an American poet, author, editor, and playwright, primarily of LGBT literature.David Bergman. "Do We Need a Gay Literature?" The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide. January–February 2010, p. 25; "Stars and Rainbows." San Francisco Chronicle. June 22, 2001, p. 5. 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.{{cite web |author=American Booksellers Association |title=The American Book Awards / Before Columbus Foundation [1980–2012] |year=2013 |url=http://www.bookweb.org/btw/awards/The-American-Book-Awards---Before-Columbus-Foundation.html |work=BookWeb |quote=2009 [...] Gizzi and Kevin Killian (Wesleyan University Press) |url-status=dead |archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20130313174235/http://bookweb.org/btw/awards/The-American-Book-Awards---Before-Columbus-Foundation.html |archivedate=March 13, 2013 |accessdate=September 25, 2013}}

Killian was also co-founder of the Poets Theater, an influential poetry, stage, and performance group based in San Francisco, as well as the New Narrative movement in San Francisco, which included figures like Robert Glück, Bruce Boone, Kathy Acker, Dennis Cooper, and more.Pohl, R.D. "Poets Theater at Burchfield Penney Art Center." Buffalo News. April 2, 2009.

Life and career

Kevin Killian was born on December 24, 1952, in Smithtown, New York.{{Cite web|title=Kevin Killian (1952–2019)|url=https://www.artforum.com/news/kevin-killian-1952-2019-80115|access-date=2021-05-14|website=www.artforum.com|date=17 June 2019 |language=en-US}} He was raised Roman Catholic and attended a Roman Catholic parochial school run by Franciscan friars.Wiegand, David and Holt, Patricia. "Books in Brief." San Francisco Chronicle. June 18, 1995. He discussed these experiences in an essay in the edited work Wrestling with the Angel.Wrestling with the Angel: Faith and Religion in the Lives of Gay Men. Brian Bouldrey, ed. Reprint ed. New York: Riverhead Trade, 1996. He was also the New York City spelling bee champion.Carroll, Jon. "Jon Carroll." San Francisco Chronicle. May 22, 2008. He attended Fordham University and graduate school at Stony Brook University in the 1970s.

Killian moved to San Francisco in 1980.[http://www.raintaxi.com/reviving-jack-spicer-an-interview-with-kevin-killian/ Bradshaw, Joseph. "Reviving Jack Spicer: An Interview with Kevin Killian."] Rain Taxi. Winter 2008. Accessed 2010-05-29. A year later in 1981, he met fellow author Dodie Bellamy. The couple, both bisexual, were married for 34 years.{{Cite web|last=Buuck|first=David|date=January 1, 2014|title=Dodie Bellamy by David Buuck|url=https://bombmagazine.org/articles/dodie-bellamy/|access-date=2021-05-14|website=BOMB Magazine}}

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.Tudor, Silke. "Night Crawler." SF Weekly. May 10, 2000; Chonin, Neva. "An Enigmatic Writer Depicts Secret Worlds." San Francisco Chronicle. June 26, 2000.

As a beginning novelist, Killian tied for first place in the "Hamming Up Hammett" Dashiell Hammett bad-writing contest in San Francisco in 1988.[https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=OnwUAAAAIBAJ&sjid=-wIEAAAAIBAJ&pg=2093,220439&dq=kevin-killian&hl=en "Would-Be Writers with Style, Dash Hammett Up in Contest."] Toledo Blade. November 1, 1988. Author Dodie Bellamy featured him as a partially fictional character in her vampire novel The Letters of Mina Harker.Benderson, Bruce. "Book Review: The Letters of Mina Harker." The Village Voice. April 14, 1998. His poetry has appeared in the anthology The Best American Poetry 1988, the magazine Discontents, and the anthology Good Times: Bad Trips.Gilbert, Matthew. "Book Review: The Best American Poetry 1988." Boston Globe. January 27, 1989; Harmanci, Reyhan. "Flip That Bad Trip." San Francisco Chronicle. September 13, 2007. Killian once based a volume of poetry on the work of horror film director Dario ArgentoDark, Jane. "Fever Pitch." The Village Voice. August 13, 2002. (motivated to do so as a response to the AIDS epidemic). Killian also helped author Alvin Orloff polish chapters of his novel Gutterboys.Ford, Dave. "Author Hangs Onto His Mad Cap As He Captures '80s Gay Scene in 'Gutterboys'." San Francisco Chronicle. August 13, 2004. Noted author Edmund White 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."White, Edmund. "Sex and the City." The New York Times. February 21, 1999. 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"."The Best Books of 2008." The Village Voice. December 10, 2008. The work was also highly praised by The New York Times.Garner, Dwight. "Sometimes Love Lives Alongside Loneliness." New York Times. December 24, 2008.

Killian's 2009 collection of short gay erotic fiction Impossible Princess won the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Erotica."22nd Annual Lambda Literary Awards." Lambda Literary Awards The first story in the collection, "Young Hank Williams", was written with Canadian cult writer Derek McCormack."[https://vimeo.com/5633347 Derek McCormack & Kevin Killian, 7-14-09]". Vimeo The collection was inspired by Kylie Minogue's album of the same name and, in turn, it inspired Conrad Tao's piano composition "All I Had Forgotten or Tried To".[https://www.92y.org/archives/conrad-taos-forgotten-tried-2017 "Conrad Tao's 'All I Had Forgotten Or Tried To' (2017)"], 92nd Street Y, January 25, 2019

Killian was founder and former director of Small Press Traffic.Schwartz, Stephen. "Alternative S.F. Bookstore Hits Tough Times." San Francisco Chronicle. August 27, 1992. He also edited the poetry zine Mirage.Feinstein, Lea. "Twenty-Five Artists, Five Spaces, Five Weeks, and a Multitude of Visions." SF Weekly. July 26, 2006.

Killian died from cancer on June 15, 2019.{{cite web|url = https://poets.org/poet/kevin-killian|title = Kevin Killian|website = Academy of American Poets|accessdate = June 16, 2019}}{{cite web |last1=Elison |first1=Meg |title=SF author and poet Kevin Killian dies |url=https://www.ebar.com/news/news//277846 |website=The Bay Area Reporter / B.A.R. Inc. |publisher=The Bay Area Reporter |accessdate=20 June 2019 |language=en}}

Poets Theater and retrospective work

Killian's interest in theatre emerged in the early 1980s when he saw experimental plays by Carla Harryman.Cook, David. "The Poets Theater Jubilee Brings Verse to the Stage." SF Weekly. January 23, 2002. Harryman and Tom Mandel subsequently cast him in their play Fist of the Colossus.[http://home.jps.net/~nada/killian.htm Sullivan, Gary. "Kevin Killian: Interview." readme. Spring/Summer 2001.] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090903003318/http://home.jps.net/~nada/killian.htm |date=2009-09-03 }} Accessed 2010-05-29. He co-founded the Poets Theater in San Francisco, and acted in as well as wrote pieces for the group. As of 2001, he had written 31 plays. He co-authored the performance art piece The Red and the Green in 2005 with cinematographer Karla Milosevich."Angel Street." The Oregonian. September 2, 2005. In 2009, Killian and David Brazil co-edited a collection of Poets Theater pieces, The Kenning Anthology of Poets Theatre: 1945–1985.

Killian was also active in bringing attention to important LGBTQ artists and writers of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. He 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.Burnham, Emily. "Words Processing." Bangor Daily News. June 7, 2008. He and artist Colter Jacobsen also helped organize a tribute ("Kiki: The Proof Is in the Pudding") to the Kiki Gallery, an influential art gallery in San Francisco in the 1980s that featured the work of LGBTQ artists.Vogel, Tracy. "The Anger and the Ecstasy of Kiki Revisited." SF Weekly. July 9, 2008.

Published works

=Story and poetry collections=

{{Cite book|title=Little Men|date=1996|publisher=Hard PressInc|isbn=9781889097015|language=en}}
{{Cite book|title=Argento series|date=2001|publisher=Krupskaya|isbn=9781928650102|language=en}}
{{Cite book|title=I Cry Like a Baby|date=2001|publisher=Painted Leaf Press|isbn=9781891305665|language=en}}
{{Cite book|title=Action Kylie|date=2008|publisher=In Girum Imus Nocte Et Consumimur Igni|isbn=9781934639009|language=en}}
{{Cite book |title=Impossible Princess |publisher=City Lights Publishers |year=2009 |isbn=9780872865280 |language=en |url=https://archive.org/details/impossibleprince00kill}}
{{Cite book|title=Tweaky Village|date=2014|publisher=Wonder|isbn=9780989598521|language=en}}
{{Cite book|title=Tony Greene Era|date=2017|publisher=Wonder|isbn=9780989598576|language=en}}
Selected Amazon Reviews. Semiotext(e) / Native Agents. 2024. {{ISBN|9781635902181}}.

=Novels=

{{Cite book |title=Shy |publisher=Crossing Press |year=1989 |isbn=9780895943484 |language=en}}
{{Cite book|title=Bedrooms Have Windows|date=1989|publisher=Amethyst Press|isbn=9780927200011|language=en|url=https://archive.org/details/bedroomshavewind00kill}}
{{Cite book |title=Arctic Summer |date=1997 |publisher=Hard Candy Books |isbn=9781563335143 |edition=1st Hard Candy |location=New York |oclc=}}
{{Cite book |title=Spreadeagle |date=2012 |publisher=Publication Studio |isbn=9781935662099 |location=Portland, Oregon |oclc=}}

=Biographies=

Poet Be Like God (co-written with Lewis Ellingham; Wesleyan University Press, 1998) {{isbn|9780819553089}}

=Edited works=

The Wild Creatures by Sam D'Allesandro (Suspect Thoughts Press, 2005) {{isbn|9780976341116}}
My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer (co-edited with Peter Gizzi; Wesleyan University Press, 2008) {{isbn|9780819570901}}
The Kenning Anthology of Poets Theater: 1945-1985 (co-edited with David Brazil; Kenning Editions, 2010) {{isbn|9780976736455}}
Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative Writing 1977-1997 (co-edited with Dodie Bellamy; Nightboat Books, 2017) {{ISBN|9781937658656}}

=Plays=

Stone Marmalade (co-written with Leslie Scalapino; Singing Horse Press, 1996) {{isbn|9780935162165}}
Often (co-written with Barbara Guest; Kenning Editions, 2001) {{isbn|9780015263423}}
Island of Lost Souls (Nomados, 2004) {{isbn|9780973152142}}

References

External links

[http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/killian/ Links to online works by Kevin Killian]
Kevin Killian and Dodie Bellamy Papers. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Category:1952 births

Category:2019 deaths

Category:People from Smithtown, New York

Category:Writers from New York (state)

Category:Writers from San Francisco

Category:Lambda Literary Award winners

Category:American LGBTQ dramatists and playwrights

Category:American male novelists

Category:20th-century American novelists

Category:21st-century American novelists

Category:American LGBTQ poets

Category:American LGBTQ novelists