Kathy Acker

Novelist, essayist, and performance artist Kathy Acker was born and raised in New York City. She was educated at Brandeis University and the University of California at San Diego, where she earned her BA. 

Black Mountain poet Charles Olson and novelist William S. Burroughs were great influences on Acker. She is also linked to the New Narrative movement initiated in the late 1970s by writers Robert Glück  and Bruce Boone in San Francisco. New Narrative sought to genuinely portray personal experiences and embraced a nuanced, authentic storytelling approach, rejecting absolute objectivity and fluidity in text meanings.

Acker composed genre-crossing work in which she frequently appropriated, reshaped, interrupted, and modified other texts to explore the intersections of sex, power dynamics, and the intricacies of language. In a 2014 article on Acker for The Believer, Chris Kraus stated that

Her appropriating compositional style prefigures the oft-debated narrative strategies of writers whose recent novels are littered with emails, transcribed conversations, text messages, found conversations, and diary entries (as if a disjunctive narrative style had never been used before the advent of digital media). ... Acker’s compositional strategies enact a more intimate space between writer and reader than most conventional narratives do, because they’re so consciously, willfully performed for an audience.

Acker’s work includes 10 novels, notably The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula (Viper’s Tongue Books, 1975), Blood and Guts in High School (Grove Press, 1978), My Mother: Demonology (Grove Press, 1993), and Pussy, King of the Pirates (Grove Press, 1996). Her versatile artistry is also reflected in the 1985 opera libretto The Birth of the Poet, which was performed in collaboration with composer Peter Gordon at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and the screenplay for the 1983 film Variety, directed by Bette Gordon. The Birth of the Poet was later published in Acker’s book Eurydice in the Underworld (Arcadia Books, 1998).  

Another notable collaboration was the 1974 video Blue Tape with artist Alan Sondheim. Acker’s work I’m Very Into You: Correspondence 1995–1996 (Semiotext(e), 2015) offers readers a deep dive into the email exchanges between Acker and media theorist McKenzie Wark over a span of 17 days in the winter of 1995–1996.

Acker died of cancer in 1997. The David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University holds a selection of her papers.