Kathy Acker

The New York Times once called her books "a rock 'n' roll version of the Critique of Pure Reason by the Marquis de Sade as performed by the Three Stooges".

Biographical note

NYU Special Collections Search Portal - “Guide to the Kathy Acker Notebooks, 1968-1974” < link >

Kathy Acker (née Karen Lehmann; April 18, 1947 – November 30, 1997) was an American experimental novelist, performance artist, playwright, postmodernist, punk poet, and sex-positive, feminist essayist and writer. Acker was strongly influenced by poets of the Black Mountain School, William S. Burroughs, David Antin, French critical theory, philosophy and pornography.

Born and raised in New York City, Acker came to be closely associated with the punk movement of the 1970s and 1980s that influenced much of the culture in and around Manhattan. Acker studied classics as an undergraduate at Brandeis University with other students who became well-known, such as Angela Davis, and aspired to write novels. Acker transferred to the University of California at San Diego, where she worked with David Antin and Jerome Rothenberg, receiving her bachelor's degree in 1968. She completed two years of graduate work at the City University of New York in Classics, specializing in Greek, but left before earning a degree. While still in New York she worked as a file clerk, secretary, stripper, and porn performer. During the 1970s she often moved back and forth between San Diego, San Francisco and New York.

In 1979, Acker won the Pushcart Prize for her short story "New York City in 1979". During the early 1980s she lived in London, where she wrote several of her most critically acclaimed works. After returning to the United States in the late 1980s, she worked as an adjunct professor at the San Francisco Art Institute, and as a visiting professor at Roanoke College, the California Institute of Arts, the University of Idaho, and the Universities of California at San Diego and at Santa Barbara.

Blood and Guts in High School (1984) is considered Acker's breakthrough work, as it is one of her most extreme explorations of sexuality and violence. Borrowing from, among other texts, Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Blood and Guts details the experiences of Janey Smith, a sex addicted and pelvic-inflammatory-disease-ridden urbanite who is in love with a father who sells her into slavery. Many critics criticized it for being demeaning toward women, and Germany banned it completely. Acker published the German court judgment against Blood and Guts in High School in Hannibal Lecter, My Father (1991).

Acker produced a considerable body of novels, wrote pieces for a number of magazines and anthologies, and also had notable pieces printed in issues of RE/Search, Angel Exhaust, monochrom, and Rapid Eye. Towards the end of her life, Acker had a measure of success in the conventional press; the Guardian published several of her articles, including an interview with the Spice Girls, which she submitted just a few months before her death. Three volumes of her non-fiction have been published and re-published since her death. In 2002, New York University staged “Discipline and Anarchy,” a retrospective exhibition of her works, while in 2007, Amandla Publishing re-published Acker's articles for the New Statesman from 1989 to 1991, and in 2008, London's Institute of Contemporary Arts held an evening of her films.

The Kathy Acker Papers (1972-1997) are housed at the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, at Duke University in Durham, NC (http://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/findingaids/acker/).

Family

• Father: Donald Lehman
• Mother: Claire Weill
• Grandfather: Florence Weill
• Stepfather: Albert Alexander
• Half-sister: Wendy Alexander
• Spouse: Robert Acker (m. 1966 - divorced)
• Spouse: Peter Gordon (m. 2/1976 - annulled)

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Source: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, December 4, 1997, Page 37. via Newspapers.com (https://www.newspapers.com/article/pittsburgh-post-gazette-obituary... : accessed May 4, 2024), clip page for Obituary for Kathy Acker

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References

1. "The Killers". San Francisco State University. Retrieved September 7, 2019 < link > “ I never met my father. Though he was married to my mother, he left her when she was three months pregnant with me. …”
2. Karen Lehman in the New York, New York, U.S., Birth Index, 1910-1965 < AncestrySharing > Name Karen Lehman Birth Date 18 Apr 1947 Birth Place Manhattan, New York City, New York, USA
3. "United States Census, 1950", , FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:6XTY-H4K1 : Fri Oct 06 00:53:07 UTC 2023), Entry for Albert A Alexander and Elaine W Alexander, 10 April 1950.
4. Karen Alexander in the U.S., School Yearbooks, 1900-2016 < AncestrySharing > Name Karen Alexander Estimated Age Abt 16 Birth Year abt 1947 Yearbook Date 1963 School Lenox High School School Location New York, New York, USA
5. New York City Marriage License Index 1908-1972 < MyHeritage > Manhattan, New York City, New York, United States, Marriage license: Sep 1 1966 Groom: Robert L Acker, Bride: Karen Alexander
6. “'The world is infested with evil!' When Kathy Acker met the Spice Girls.” Hayley Campbell and Kathy Acker. (26 Feb 2018) < link >
7. “When Kathy Acker Interviewed the Spice Girls.” By Emily Temple. (April 18, 2018) < link >
8. Find a Grave, database and images (https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/222442841/kathy-acker: accessed May 4, 2024), memorial page for Kathy Acker (18 Apr 1947–30 Nov 1997), Find a Grave Memorial ID 222442841; Cremated; Maintained by Find a Grave.
9. “Obituary: Kathy Acker.” By Peter Guttridge (03 December 1997). < independent.co.uk >; (document attached)
10. “God’s Gaultier.” By Derek McCormack. (1.09.06) < thefanzine.com > “ Kathy Acker’s ghost wafts among her wardrobe. She lived in these clothes. These clothes lived through her. She was, without a doubt, the most spectacularly-clad writer I’ve ever seen. Who she was was wrapped up with what she wore.”
11. “Who's Afraid of Kathy Acker?” Documentary film, directed by Barbara Caspar (2007). < imdb >
12. Kraus, Chris. “Sex, tattle and soul: how Kathy Acker shocked and seduced the literary world.” (19 Aug 2017). < theguardian.com >
13. Kraus, Chris. “After Kathy Acker: A Biography.” (Aug 32, 2017). < GoogleBooks >
14. “After Kathy Acker: A Biography by Chris Kraus review – baffling life study” < theguardian.com >
15. Turner, Jenny (October 18, 2017). "Literary Friction". London Review of Books. 39 (20). Retrieved 4 May 2024 < link >; (document attached)
16. Excerpted from Matias Viegener. The Assassination of Kathy Acker. New York: Guillotine Series #13. April 2018. < link >
17. Ettler, J. (2018). When I Met Kathy Acker. M/C Journal, 21(5). https://doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1483
18. “Kathy Acker Is the Secret Mom of Every Female Artist.” By Sophia Shalmiyev. < link >
19. “Why post-punk pioneer Kathy Acker is making a comeback.” By Harriet Fitch Little. (April 26, 2019). < link >
20. Exhibitions 1 May – 4 August 2019 Opening Tuesday 30 April, 6 – 8pm. < link > “I, I, I, I, I, I, I, Kathy Acker” is the first UK exhibition dedicated to the American writer Kathy Acker (1947 – 1997), and her written, spoken and performed work.
21. Neil Gaiman on the Great Kathy Acker. “Rereading Pussy, King of the Pirates”. VIA GROVE ATLANTIC (February 12, 2021). < link >
22. McBride, Jason. “Eat Your Mind: The Radical Life and Work of Kathy Acker.” (2022) < GoogleBooks > “She really was like a librarian,” Winters said, “and treated people like books. She wanted to read as many as possible. < page XV. >
23. “Kathy Acker, late punk empress of radical lit, gets a fitting biography.” By Jessica Ferri (Nov. 21, 2022) < link > REVIEW of “Eat Your Mind: The Radical Life and Work of Kathy Acker”. By Jason McBride.
24. “Kathy Acker’s art of identity theft.” By Maggie Doherty. (November 28, 2022). < newyorker.com >
25. “Kathy Acker was against creativity: “I set up this task, this nutty task basically, and I’d do it!” By Mason Currey. (March 18, 2024). < link >
26. https://findingaids.library.nyu.edu/fales/mss_434/all/
27. https://www.familysearch.org/tree/person/sources/9JH9-V5B
28. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/kathy-acker
29. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathy_Acker
30. NPG x36069; Kathy Acker (née Lehman) - Portrait - National Portrait Gallery < digital image >
31. KATHY ACKER TWIRL, London. < digital image > “… I loved Acker for many things but especially because her form of bravery was to be utterly terrified and do it anyway.”