After Kathy Acker

Rich girl, street punk, lost girl and icon ... scholar, stripper, victim and media-whore: The late Kathy Acker's legend and writings are wrapped in mythologies, created mostly by Acker herself. Twenty years after her death, Acker's 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 Acker's movement through some of the late 20th century's most significant artistic enterprises. Since her mid-teens, Acker lived her ideal of the Great Writer as Culture Hero. Arguably, she was the only female writer to succeed in assuming this role. She died of untreated cancer at an alternative clinic in Tijuana when she was 50 years old, but as Kraus argues, the real pathos of Acker's life lies in the fact that by then she'd already outlived this ideal.