Kevin Killian
Encyclopedia
Kevin Killian is an American
poet
, author
, and playwright
of primarily LGBT literature
. He is also a highly regarded editor. 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. His novel, Impossible Princess, won the 2010 Lambda Literary Award
as the best gay erotic fiction work of 2009.
Killian is also co-founder of the Poets Theater, an influential poetry, stage, and performance group based in San Francisco.
run by Franciscan
monks, where he suffered what he has described as routine abuse. He discussed these experiences in an essay in the edited work Wrestling With the Angel, which describes 21 gay men's experiences with religion. He was also the New York City
spelling bee
champion. 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. Although he is gay and Dodie Bellamy
is a lesbian, the couple married and have an active heterosexual sex life. 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. 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.
As a beginning novelist, he tied for first place in the "Hamming Up Hammett" Dashiell Hammett
bad writing contest in San Francisco in 1988. Author Dodie Bellamy featured him as a partially-fictional character in her vampire
novel, The Letters of Mina Harker. His poetry has appeared in the anthology
The Best American Poetry 1988
, the magazine Discontents, and the anthology Good Times: Bad Trips. He once based an entire volume of poetry on the work of horror film
director Dario Argento
(motivated to do so as a response to the AIDS
epidemic). He also helped author Alvin Orloff polish chapters of his novel Gutterboys. 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." 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 work was also highly praised by The New York Times.
His 2009 collection of short gay erotic fiction, Impossible Princess, won the Lambda Literary Foundation Award for best gay men's erotica. It was his third collection of short fiction.
Killian is founder and former director of Small Press Traffic
. He now edits the poetry
'zine Mirage.
. Harryman and Tom Mandel subsequently cast him in their play, Fist of the Colossus. He co-founded the Poets Theater in San Francisco, and has acted in as well as written pieces for staging by 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 cinemtographer Karla Milosevich. In 2009, Killian and David Brazil co-edited a collection of Poets Theater pieces, The Kenning Anthology of Poets Theatre: 1945-1985.
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. 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.
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
poet
Poetry
Poetry is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning...
, author
Author
An author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...
, and playwright
Playwright
A playwright, also called a dramatist, is a person who writes plays.The term is not a variant spelling of "playwrite", but something quite distinct: the word wright is an archaic English term for a craftsman or builder...
of primarily LGBT literature
LGBT literature
Gay literature is a collective term for literature produced by or for the LGBT community, or which involves characters, plot lines or themes portraying male homosexual behavior.-Subgenres:...
. He is also a highly regarded editor. My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer, which he co-edited with Peter Gizzi
Peter Gizzi
Peter Gizzi is an award-winning American poet and renowned editor of the American poet Jack Spicer. He attended Brown University, New York University and the State University of New York at Buffalo.-Life and career:...
, won the American Book Award
American Book Award
The American Book Award was established in 1978 by the Before Columbus Foundation. It seeks to recognize outstanding literary achievement by contemporary American authors, without restriction to race, sex, ethnic background, or genre...
for poetry in 2009. His novel, Impossible Princess, won the 2010 Lambda Literary Award
Lambda Literary Award
Lambda Literary Awards are awarded yearly by the US-based Lambda Literary Foundation to published works which celebrate or explore LGBT themes. Categories include Humor, Romance and Biography. To qualify, a book must have been published in the United States in the year current to the award...
as the best gay erotic fiction work of 2009.
Killian is also co-founder of the Poets Theater, an influential poetry, stage, and performance group based in San Francisco.
Life and career
He was raised Roman Catholic. He attended a Roman Catholic parochial schoolParochial school
A parochial school is a school that provides religious education in addition to conventional education. In a narrower sense, a parochial school is a Christian grammar school or high school which is part of, and run by, a parish.-United Kingdom:...
run by Franciscan
Franciscan
Most Franciscans are members of Roman Catholic religious orders founded by Saint Francis of Assisi. Besides Roman Catholic communities, there are also Old Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran, ecumenical and Non-denominational Franciscan communities....
monks, where he suffered what he has described as routine abuse. He discussed these experiences in an essay in the edited work Wrestling With the Angel, which describes 21 gay men's experiences with religion. He was also the New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
spelling bee
Spelling bee
A spelling bee is a competition where contestants, usually children, are asked to spell English words. The concept is thought to have originated in the United States....
champion. 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. Although he is gay and Dodie Bellamy
Dodie Bellamy
Dodie Bellamy is an American novelist, nonfiction author, journalist and editor. Her work is frequently associated with that of Dennis Cooper, Kathy Acker, and Eileen Myles...
is a lesbian, the couple married and have an active heterosexual sex life. Bellamy has written publicly about their marriage and sex life, and both individuals have discussed the large size of Killian's penis
Penis
The penis is a biological feature of male animals including both vertebrates and invertebrates...
in their writing. Killian admired the work of JT LeRoy
JT LeRoy
Jeremiah "Terminator" LeRoy was a pseudonym created by American writer Laura Albert. The name was used from 1996 on for publication in magazines such as Nerve and Shout NY. After his first novel Sarah was published, "LeRoy" started making public appearances...
(later to be revealed as the pen name
Pen name
A pen name, nom de plume, or literary double, is a pseudonym adopted by an author. A pen name may be used to make the author's name more distinctive, to disguise his or her gender, to distance an author from some or all of his or her works, to protect the author from retribution for his or her...
and persona
Persona
A persona, in the word's everyday usage, is a social role or a character played by an actor. The word is derived from Latin, where it originally referred to a theatrical mask. The Latin word probably derived from the Etruscan word "phersu", with the same meaning, and that from the Greek πρόσωπον...
of author Laura Albert
Laura Albert
Laura Victoria Albert is the author of writings credited to the fictional teenage persona of JT LeRoy, a long-running literary hoax in which LeRoy was presented to the public and publishers as a transgender, sexually questioning, abused, former homeless drug addict and male prostitute...
), and held public readings of LeRoy's work in 2000.
As a beginning novelist, he tied for first place in the "Hamming Up Hammett" Dashiell Hammett
Dashiell Hammett
Samuel Dashiell Hammett was an American author of hard-boiled detective novels and short stories, and political activist. Among the enduring characters he created are Sam Spade , Nick and Nora Charles , and the Continental Op .In addition to the significant influence his novels and stories had on...
bad writing contest in San Francisco in 1988. Author Dodie Bellamy featured him as a partially-fictional character in her vampire
Vampire
Vampires are mythological or folkloric beings who subsist by feeding on the life essence of living creatures, regardless of whether they are undead or a living person...
novel, The Letters of Mina Harker. His poetry has appeared in the anthology
Anthology
An anthology is a collection of literary works chosen by the compiler. It may be a collection of poems, short stories, plays, songs, or excerpts...
The Best American Poetry 1988
The Best American Poetry
The Best American Poetry series consists of annual poetry anthologies, each containing seventy-five poems.The series, begun by poet and editor David Lehman in 1988, has a different guest editor every year...
, the magazine Discontents, and the anthology Good Times: Bad Trips. He once based an entire volume of poetry on the work of horror film
Horror film
Horror films seek to elicit a negative emotional reaction from viewers by playing on the audience's most primal fears. They often feature scenes that startle the viewer through the means of macabre and the supernatural, thus frequently overlapping with the fantasy and science fiction genres...
director Dario Argento
Dario Argento
Dario Argento is an Italian film director, producer and screenwriter. He is best known for his work in the horror film genre, particularly in the subgenre known as giallo, and for his influence on modern horror and slasher movies....
(motivated to do so as a response to the AIDS
AIDS
Acquired immune deficiency syndrome or acquired immunodeficiency syndrome is a disease of the human immune system caused by the human immunodeficiency virus...
epidemic). He also helped author Alvin Orloff polish chapters of his novel Gutterboys. Noted author Edmund White
Edmund White
Edmund Valentine White III is an American author and literary critic. He is a member of the faculty of Princeton University's Program in Creative Writing.- Life and work :...
, writing in The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
, 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." 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 work was also highly praised by The New York Times.
His 2009 collection of short gay erotic fiction, Impossible Princess, won the Lambda Literary Foundation Award for best gay men's erotica. It was his third collection of short fiction.
Killian is founder and former director of Small Press Traffic
Small Press Traffic
Small Press Traffic Literary Arts Center was founded in 1974 in San Francisco. It had a storefront in the Mission District during the 1970s and 1980s...
. He now edits the poetry
Poetry
Poetry is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning...
'zine Mirage.
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 HarrymanCarla Harryman
Carla Harryman is an American poet, essayist, and playwright often associated with the Language poets. She teaches Creative Writing at Eastern Michigan University and serves on the MFA faculty of the Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College...
. Harryman and Tom Mandel subsequently cast him in their play, Fist of the Colossus. He co-founded the Poets Theater in San Francisco, and has acted in as well as written pieces for staging by the group. As of 2001, he had written 31 plays. He co-authored the performance art
Performance art
In art, performance art is a performance presented to an audience, traditionally interdisciplinary. Performance may be either scripted or unscripted, random or carefully orchestrated; spontaneous or otherwise carefully planned with or without audience participation. The performance can be live or...
piece The Red and the Green in 2005 with cinemtographer Karla Milosevich. In 2009, Killian and David Brazil co-edited a collection of Poets Theater pieces, The Kenning Anthology of Poets Theatre: 1945-1985.
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
University of Maine
The University of Maine is a public research university located in Orono, Maine, United States. The university was established in 1865 as a land grant college and is referred to as the flagship university of the University of Maine System...
"Poetry of the 1970s" conference. 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.
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 PublishersCity Lights BookstoreCity Lights is an independent bookstore-publisher combination that specializes in world literature, the arts, and progressive politics. It also houses the nonprofit City Lights Foundation, which publishes selected titles related to San Francisco culture. It was founded in 1953 by poet Lawrence...
, 2009)
Novels
- Shy (The Crossing PressCrown Publishing Group-External links:*...
, 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 PressWesleyan University PressWesleyan University Press is a university press that is part of Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. The Press is currently directed by Suzanna Tamminen, a published poet and essayist...
, 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)