PROSE ACTS: PARTICIPATING WRITERS >>DODIE BELLAMY Dodie Bellamy, born 1951, is a novelist, critic and cultural journalist. She has written a novel, The Letters of Mina Harker (Hard Press, 1998), a collection of memoirs, Feminine Hijinx (Hanuman, 1990), an epistolary collaboration on AIDS with the late Sam D'Allesandro, Real (Talisman House, 1994), and three smaller books, Answer (Leave Books, 1993), Broken English (Meow, 1996), and Hallucinations (Meow, 1997). Forthcoming from Tender Buttons is a book of prose poems, Cunt-Ups, a radical feminist revision of the "cut-up" pioneered by William Burroughs and Bryon Gysin. Bellamy's work has been widely anthologized and has appeared in, among others, the anthologies High Risk (Plume, 1991), The Art of Practice: 45 Contemporary Poets (Potes & Poets Press, 1994), A Poetics of Criticism (Leave Books, 1994), The New Fuck You (Semiotexte, 1995), Primary Trouble (Talisman House, 1996), Moving Borders: Three Decades of Innovative Writing by Women (Talisman House, 1998), and Best American Erotica 2001 (Simon and Schuster). With Kevin Killian, Bellamy is writing a hybrid transgenre work of fiction and history, Eyewitness, commissioned by Berkeley's Atelos Press. She has written often and vividly on contemporary literature, transgression, feminist and queer theory, AIDS and body issues. She is writing a new novel, The Fourth Form, and editing a collection of her theoretical and critical essays. With Kevin Killian she has edited 95 issues of the SF-based writing/art zine they call Mirage #4/Period[ical]. She is a lecturer in the creative writing department of San Francisco State University. >>LAWRENCE YTZHAK BRAITHWAITE Lawrence Ytzhak Braithwaite is the author of the novels Wigger, Ratz Are Nice (PSP) (Alyson). He was the recipiant of the Canada Council of the Arts writing award. Braithwaite's work has appeared in MAKA: DIASPORIC JUKS (Sister Vision Press), Holy Titclamps, Red Zone (Victoria's street peoples' magazine), Mirage #4/Period[ical], Fernwood's, Sleeping Dragon, and 14 Hills, and has been given honorable mention in Best American Gay Fiction 1 and 2. He has performed at Lollapalooza, San Francisco's New Langton Arts Gallery and appeared on the "Class and Queer Writing" panel at Outwrite 99 in Boston, MA. Braithwaite's work will soon appear in The Harrington Gay Men's Quarterly, Blue Prints: An Anthology of Black British Columbian Literture and Orature, edited by Wayde Compton. His new unpublished manuscript entitled Heavy Monsters is a collection of previously published and new short fiction. Braithwaite lives in a fugitive bunker in the Fernwood district of Victoria, BC. >>DENNIS COOPER Dennis Cooper is the author of the novels Closer (co-winner of the Ferro-Grumley Award for fiction 1989), Frisk (1991), Try (1994), Guide (1997), Period (1999), the short fiction collection Wrong (1992), and The Dream Police: Selected Poems 1969-1993 (all books published by Grove Press). All Ears, a collection of cultural criticism, rants, and celebrity interviews, was published in 1999. He has collaborated with artists on three projects: Horror Hospital Unplugged (with Keith Mayerson), Jerk (with Nayland Blake), and Weird Little Boy (with John Zorn, Mike Patton, and others). Cooper is a contributing editor of Artforum, Spin, Los Angeles Weekly, and Nerve. He is currently editing with Amy Scholder The Kathy Acker Reader, due from Grove Press in 2002. A new novel, My Loose Thread will be published by Canongate in 2002. Dennis Cooper lives in Los Angeles. >>KARI EDWARDS kari edwards is a poet, artist and gender activist. edwards is the author of post/(pink) (2001) prose poems on gender and language and Mandala of a dharma queen (1998) on dada, anarchy and gender. hie is also the poetry editor of I.F.G.Eıs Transgender - Tapestry: a International Publication on Transgender issues. hir work has been exhibited throughout the United States, including Denver Art Museum, New Orleans Contemporary Art Museum, The University of California at San Diego, and The University of Massachusetts at Amherst. edwardsı work can also be found in Blood and Tears (2000) an anthology on Matthew Shepard, (Painted leaf Press), The International Journal of Sexuality and Gender Studies (October 2000), Bombay Gin, Van Goghıs Ear, Belight Fiction, In Posse and Fracture. hir new unpublished manuscript "a day in the life of p.," is a story with our a solid subject and or gender. edwards also teaches on gender and myth at Naropa University. >>ROBERT GLüCK Robert Glück is the author of eight books of poetry and fiction, most recently two novels: Margery Kempe and Jack the Modernist (both from High Risk Books, 1994 and 1995). Glück's next book, Denny Smith, is a collection of stories. Glück was an Associate Editor at Lapis Press, and Director of The Poetry Center at San Francisco State University, where he teaches fiction. His critical articles have appeared in Poetics Journal, The Village Voice, The London Times Literary Supplement and The Review of Contemporary Fiction. He writes for Nest: A Quarterly of Interiors and is an editor of Narrativity. >>SANDER HICKS Sander Hicks incorporated his guerrilla publishing outfit, Soft Skull Press, in 1996, and published Michael Stipe, Lee Ranaldo, Eileen Myles, and Dennis Cooper; as well as the radical political science of Upski Wimsatt, Mickey Z, and the controversial Fortunate Son: George W. Bush and the Making of an American President. Sander Hicks' plays have also been published by Soft Skull, in two books: The Breaking Manager and Cash Cow &Artanimal. The LA Weekly called "The Breaking Light" an "off-the-wall satire [that] barrels full force toward an absurd little revolutionary war: a capitalist confectionery company vs. a Maoist motivational speaker, an inspired Christian, and Calculatrice, a worker-turned-executive with a visionary candy." Hicks is currently at work on a political biography of White House puppet master Karl C. Rove. >>KEVIN KILLIAN Kevin Killian, born 1952, is a poet, novelist, critic and playwright. He has written a novel, Shy (1989), a book of memoirs, Bedrooms Have Windows (1989), and three chapbooks, Desiree (1986), Santa (1995), and The Kink of Chris Komater (1999). In the last few years he has published: a new novel, Arctic Summer (1997), and a book of stories, Little Men (1996), which won the PEN Oakland award for fiction. His work has been widely anthologized and has appeared in, among others, Best American Poetry 1988 (ed. John Ashbery), Men on Men (ed. Geo. Stambolian), Discontents (ed. Dennis Cooper) and Best Gay American Fiction 1996 and 1997 (ed. Brian Bouldrey). See Chapter 5, "Scandalous Narratives," and afterword, "In Conclusions," of Earl Jackson, Jr's Strategies of Deviance: Studies in Gay Male Representation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), for extended consideration of Killians's work (pp. 179-266). He has written on the Bay Area art scene for Artforum, Artweek, Framework, etc., etc. and acted in video and theater work for Anne Carson, Abigail Child, Margaret Crane, Cecilia Dougherty, Kota Ezawa, Phoebe Gloeckner, Carla Harryman, Sue Marcoux, Ramond Pettibon, Leslie Scalapino, Sarah Schulman, Leslie Singer, Laurie Weeks, et al. With Lew Ellingham, Killian has written many essays and articles on the life and work of the American poet Jack Spicer [1925-65] and co-edited Spicer's posthumous books The Train of Thought and The Tower of Babel (both 1994). Their biography of Spicer, Poet Be Like God: Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance was published by Wesleyan University Press in 1998. He is writing a new novel "Spreadeagle," and a sequel to his memoirs called "Bachelors Get Lonely." With Dodie Bellamy he has edited 96 issues of the SF-based writing/art zine they call Mirage #4/Period[ical]. His first collection of poetry, Argento Series, appeared in June 2001 (Krupskaya Books), and Kenning will print his dramatic collaboration with Barbara Guest, Often, in August 2001. >>EILEEN MYLES Eileen Myles is a poet who has been living and writing in New York since the mid-seventies. As poet, performer and politician (Myles conducted an openly female write-in campaign for President of the United States in 1992) she has excelled at the task of bringing the aesthetics of New York School poetry into the culture at large. She comes out of the East Village poetry scene and worked as assistant to the poet James Schuyler, who was a friend and great influence on her work. From 1984-86 she was the Artistic Director of St. Markıs Poetry Project. Myles is a virtuoso performer who has read her poems at CBGBıs, Stanford the Dia Center for the Arts, toured nationally in 1997 with Sister Spit, San Franciscoıs all-girl spoken mike, and read her work in Germany, Russia and Iceland. She co-edited (with Liz Kotz) The New Fuck You/adventures in lesbian reading (Semiotexte, 1995). Her articles and reviews have appeared in The Nation, The Village Voice, Art in America, Nest, Out and The Stranger. Her books of poetry and fiction include School of Fish (Black Sparrow, 1997), Maxfield Parrish (Black Sparrow, 1995), Chelsea Girls (Black Sparrow, 1994) and Not Me (Semiotexte, 1991) and most recently a novel, Cool for You (Soft Skull, 2000). In October 2001, Myles will curate ten days of poetry and music at Hallwalls Contemporary Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York. >>MATTHEW STADLER Mathew Stadler is the author of the novels Allen Stein (Grove-Atlantic, 1999), The Sex Offender (Harper-Collins, 1994), The Dissolution of Nicholas Dee (Charles Scribnerıs Sons, 1993), and Landscape Memory (Charles Scribnerıs Sons, 1990). He has been awarded the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Award for Fiction by the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2000; Whiting Foundation Writers Award, 1995; Ingram-Merrill Foundation award for Fiction Writing, 1994; and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1992. Stadlerıs work has appeared in Best Gay Fiction of 1996, ed. Brian Bouldrey, In A Different Light: Visual Culture, Sexual Identity, Queer Practice in 1995, and Men On Men 4. in 1992. He writes nonfiction for The Stranger, New York Times Book Review, Seattle Weekly, and The Village Voice, among other publications, and is the literary editor of Nest: A Magazine of Architecture and Design and sits on the Editorial Board of Wiederhall, an international journal of architecture and related arts. Since 1996, Stadler has been on the Board of Directors of Richard Hugo House Literary Arts Center. He is part of the core writing faculty at Bard College. >>ROBERTO TEJADA Roberto Tejada is a poet and art writer from Los Angeles. Before moving to Buffalo, he worked in Mexico City as an independent art critic, was founding editor of Mandorla (a multilingual journal of inter-American poetics), executive editor of Artes de México magazine and, in Texas, the photography curator at Southwest Texas State University. He has written for Afterimage, Aperture, SF Camerawork, and is the author of En algún otro lado (Vuelta, 1992), Gift + Verdict (Leroy, 1999) and - in collaboration with artist Thomas Glassford - the forthcoming Amulet Anatomy (Phylum, 2001).