After Kathy Acker

Rich girl, street punk, lost girl and icon ... scholar, stripper, victim and media-whore: The late Kathy Ackers legend and writings are wrapped in mythologies, created mostly by Acker herself. The media storm that surrounded Kathy Ackers books was unprecedented: her books were banned in several countries and condemned by the mainstream media, but eventually the controversy, and attention, faded away.

Twenty years after her untimely death aged just 50, Ackers legend has faded, making her writing more legible.

In this first, fully authorized biography, Kraus approaches Acker both as a writer, and as a member of the artistic communities from which she emerged. At once forensic and intimate, After Kathy Acker traces the extreme discipline and literary strategies Acker used to develop her work, and the contradictions she longed to embody. Using exhaustive archival research and ongoing conversations with mutual colleagues and friends, Kraus charts Ackers movement through some of the late twentieth centurys most significant artistic enterprises.