Kevin Killian

Kevin Killian
Born	(1952-12-24)December 24, 1952 Smithtown, New York, U.S.
Died	June 15, 2019(2019-06-15) (aged 66) San Francisco, California, U.S.
Occupation	Poet author editor playwright
Alma mater	Fordham University, Stonybrook University
Genre	LGBT literature
Spouse	Dodie Bellamy

Kevin Killian (December 24, 1952 – June 15, 2019)^[1] was an American poet, author, editor, and playwright primarily of LGBT literature.^[2][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]

Killian was also co-founder of the Poets Theater, an influential poetry, stage, and performance group based in San Francisco.^[5]

Life and career[]

Kevin Killian was born on December 24, 1952 in Smithtown, New York.^[6] He was raised Roman Catholic and attended a Roman Catholic parochial school run by Franciscan friars.^[7] He discussed these experiences in an essay in the edited work Wrestling with the Angel.^[8] He was also the New York City spelling bee champion.^[9] He attended Fordham University and graduate school at Stony Brook University in the 1970s.^[6]

Killian moved to San Francisco in 1980.^[10] A year later in 1981, he met fellow author Dodie Bellamy, both are bisexual.^[1][6] The couple were married for 34 years and had an active heterosexual sex life.^[1][11][12]

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.^[13]

As a beginning novelist, Killian tied for first place in the "Hamming Up Hammett" Dashiell Hammett bad-writing contest in San Francisco in 1988.^[14] Author Dodie Bellamy featured him as a partially fictional character in her vampire novel The Letters of Mina Harker.^[15] His poetry has appeared in the anthology The Best American Poetry 1988, the magazine Discontents, and the anthology Good Times: Bad Trips.^[16] Killian once based a volume of poetry on the work of horror film director Dario Argento^[17] (motivated to do so as a response to the AIDS epidemic). Killian also helped author polish chapters of his novel Gutterboys.^[18] 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."^[19] 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.^[20]

Killian's 2009 collection of short gay erotic fiction Impossible Princess won the Lambda Literary Foundation Award for best gay men's erotica.^[21] The first story in the collection, "Young Hank Williams," was written with Canadian cult writer Derek McCormack.^[22] 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".^[23]

Killian was founder and former director of .^[24] He also edited the poetry 'zine Mirage.^[25]

Killian died from cancer on June 15, 2019.^[26][12]

Poets Theater and retrospective work[]

Killian's interest in theatre emerged in the early 1980s when he saw experimental plays by Carla Harryman.^[27] Harryman and Tom Mandel subsequently cast him in their play Fist of the Colossus.^[28] He co-founded the Poets Theater in San Francisco,^[5] and acted in as well as wrote pieces for the group.^[27] As of 2001, he had written 31 plays.^[28] He co-authored the performance art piece The Red and the Green in 2005 with cinematographer Karla Milosevich.^[29] In 2009, Killian and David Brazil co-edited a collection of Poets Theater pieces, The Kenning Anthology of Poets Theatre: 1945–1985.^[5]

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.^[30] 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.^[31]

Published works[]

Story and poetry collections[]

• Little Men. Hard PressInc. 1996. ISBN 9781889097015.
• Argento series. Krupskaya. 2001. ISBN 9781928650102.
• I Cry Like a Baby. Painted Leaf Press. 2001. ISBN 9781891305665.
• Action Kylie. In Girum Imus Nocte Et Consumimur Igni. 2008. ISBN 9781934639009.
• Impossible Princess. City Lights Publishers. 2009-10-10. ISBN 9780872865280.
• Tweaky Village. Wonder. 2014. ISBN 9780989598521.
• Tony Greene Era. Wonder. 2017. ISBN 9780989598576.

Novels[]

• Shy. Crossing Press. 1989-04-01. ISBN 9780895943484.
• Bedrooms Have Windows. Amethyst Press. 1989. ISBN 9780927200011.
• Arctic Summer (1st Hard Candy ed.). New York: Hard Candy Books. 1997. ISBN 9781563335143. OCLC 36715716.
• . Portland, Oregon: Publication Studio. 2012. ISBN 9781935662099. OCLC 826657707.

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[]

• Links to online works by Kevin Killian
• Kevin Killian and Dodie Bellamy Papers. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.