Kevin Killian (1952–2019) was a San Francisco–based poet, playwright, novelist, biographer, editor, critic, and artist. Highly prolific and radically queer, he published several volumes of poetry and short stories, as well as four novels. He also wrote and produced fifty plays, and with his wife, Dodie Bellamy, coedited Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative 1977–1997. In addition to reviewing for Amazon, Killian published criticism in Art in America, Artforum, Artweek, the Brooklyn Rail, BOMB, Framework, and elsewhere. Poet D. A. Powell has called Killian “a dark master of the word … an inviting bridegroom and a voyeur who'll let us play in his fictions until we're spent.”
Wayne Koestenbaum—poet, critic, fiction writer, artist, filmmaker, performer—has published twenty-two books, including Ultramarine, The Cheerful Scapegoat, Figure It Out, Camp Marmalade, My 1980s & Other Essays, The Anatomy of Harpo Marx, Humiliation, Hotel Theory, Circus, Andy Warhol, Jackie under My Skin, and The Queen's Throat (nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award). His first feature-length film, The Collective, premiered at UnionDocs (New York) in 2021. In 2020 he received an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. He is a distinguished professor of English, French, and comparative literature at the City University of New York Graduate Center.
Dodie Bellamy's writing focuses on sexuality, politics and narrative experimentation, challenging the distinctions between fiction, the essay and poetry. In 2018–19 she was the subject of On Our Mind, a yearlong series of public events, commissioned essays and reading group meetings organized by CCA Wattis ICA. With Kevin Killian, she coedited Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative 1977–1997. A compendium of essays on Bellamy's work, Dodie Bellamy Is on Our Mind, was published in 2020 by Wattis ICA/Semiotext(e).
Included in the New Yorker's Best Books of 2024 list.