Kevin Killian

Kevin Killian (December 24, 1952 – June 15, 2019) was an American poet, author, editor, and playwright, primarily of LGBT literature.

Killian was also co-founder of the Poets Theater, an influential poetry, stage, and performance group based in San Francisco, as well as the New Narrative movement in San Francisco, which included Bob Glück, Bruce Boone, Kathy Acker, Dennis Cooper, and others.

Life and career Kevin Killian was born on December 24, 1952, in Smithtown, New York. He was raised Roman Catholic and attended a Roman Catholic parochial school run by Franciscan friars. He discussed these experiences in an essay in the anthology Wrestling with the Angel. He was also the New York City spelling bee champion. He attended Fordham University and graduate school at Stony Brook University in the 1970s. A year later in 1981, he met fellow author Dodie Bellamy.

As a beginning novelist, Killian tied for first place in the "Hamming Up Hammett" Dashiell Hammett bad-writing contest in San Francisco in 1988. Bellamy featured him as a partially fictional character in her vampire novel The Letters of Mina Harker. His poetry has appeared in the anthology The Best American Poetry 1988, the magazine Discontents, and the anthology Good Times: Bad Trips. Killian once based a volume of poetry on the work of horror film director Dario Argento (motivated to do so as a response to the AIDS epidemic). Killian also helped author Alvin Orloff polish chapters of his novel Gutterboys. Noted author Edmund White described his work as "a kind of mandarin American casualness that is peculiar to … West Coast writers … a school of refined but deceptively offhand stylists." The Village Voice called My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer, which he co-edited with Peter Gizzi, "impeccably edited". The work was also highly praised by The New York Times.

Killian's 2009 collection of short gay erotic fiction Impossible Princess won the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Erotica. The first story in the collection, "Young Hank Williams", was written with Canadian cult writer Derek McCormack. The collection was inspired by Kylie Minogue's album of the same name and, in turn, it inspired Conrad Tao's piano composition "All I Had Forgotten or Tried To".

Killian was founder and former director of Small Press Traffic. He also edited the poetry zine Mirage.

Killian died from cancer on June 15, 2019.

Poets Theater and retrospective work Killian's interest in theatre emerged in the early 1980s when he saw experimental plays by Carla Harryman. Harryman and Tom Mandel subsequently cast him in their play Fist of the Colossus. He co-founded the Poets Theater in San Francisco, In 2009, Killian and David Brazil co-edited a collection of Poets Theater pieces, The Kenning Anthology of Poets Theatre: 1945–1985. He and artist Colter Jacobsen also helped organize a tribute ("Kiki: The Proof Is in the Pudding") to the Kiki Gallery, an influential art gallery in San Francisco in the 1980s that featured the work of LGBTQ artists.

Published works Story and poetry collections

Selected Amazon Reviews. Semiotext(e) / Native Agents. 2024. . Padam Padam: The Collected Poems. Nightboat Books. 2025. .

Novels

Biographies Poet Be Like God (co-written with Lewis Ellingham; Wesleyan University Press, 1998)

Edited works The Wild Creatures by Sam D'Allesandro (Suspect Thoughts Press, 2005) My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer (co-edited with Peter Gizzi; Wesleyan University Press, 2008) The Kenning Anthology of Poets Theater: 1945-1985 (co-edited with David Brazil; Kenning Editions, 2010) Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative Writing 1977-1997 (co-edited with Dodie Bellamy; Nightboat Books, 2017)

Plays Stone Marmalade (co-written with Leslie Scalapino; Singing Horse Press, 1996) Often (co-written with Barbara Guest; Kenning Editions, 2001) Island of Lost Souls (Nomados, 2004)