Rikki Ducornet

Rikki Ducornet (; born Erica DeGre; April 19, 1943) is an American writer, poet, and artist. Her work has been described as "linguistically explosive and socially relevant," and praised for "deploy[ing] tactics familiar to the historical avant-garde, including an emphasis on gnosticism, cosmology, diablerie, bestiary, eroticism, and revolution, to produce an astounding body of work, cogent and ethical in its beauty and spirit."

Biography Rikki Ducornet was born in Canton, New York. Gerard DeGré, Ducornet's father, was a professor of social philosophy, and her mother Muriel hosted community-interest programs on radio and television. Ducornet was raised in a multicultural household as her father was Cuban and her mother was Russian-Jewish. Ducornet's father encouraged her to read books by authors such as Albert Camus and Lao Tzu, and to pursue an exploration of knowledge. Ducornet also spent two years in Algeria in the mid-1960s after the Algerian war of Independence. While at Bard she met Robert Coover and Robert Kelly, two authors who shared Ducornet's fascination with metamorphosis and provided early models of how fiction might express this interest. In 1972 she moved to the Loire Valley in France with her then husband, Guy Ducornet, where she lived for the next eighteen years. As a young girl, Ducornet dreamed of being a visual artist and it wasn't until she moved to France with her husband that she began to seriously think about writing. In 1988 she won a Bunting Institute fellowship at Radcliffe, and in 1989 accepted a teaching position in the English Department at the University of Denver. In 2007, she replaced retired Dr. Ernest Gaines as Writer in Residence at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Ducornet currently lives in Port Townsend, Washington.

Ducornet is the subject of the Steely Dan song "Rikki Don't Lose That Number." Steely Dan singer Donald Fagen had met her at Bard College.

Writing Ducornet is known for her writing characterized by motifs of nature, Eros, abusive authority, subversion, and the creative imagination. Ducornet hand writes the drafts of her books with pen and ink and when writing, Ducornet does not begin with a set plot but rather derives her stories from the hearts of her subjects. In addition to being known as a writer, Ducornet also works in the mediums of painting and printmaking. The show exhibited a series of 25-foot-long painted scrolls hand painted by Ducornet and multimedia wire sculptures by Margie McDonald.

Ducornet was influenced by surrealism and has written about the movement. She wrote the foreword to Penelope Rosemont’s Surrealist Experiences: 1001 Dawns, 221 Midnights (Black Swan Press, 2000). In addition, Ducornet is a contributor to (on "Imagination") and the subject of an entry in the three-volume International Encyclopedia of Surrealism; for her entry in the latter, Ducornet told critic Michelle Ryan-Sautour that she did not know "what it means to ‘do’ surrealism. I do know, however, that my process is informed by, energized by, sparked . . . by memory, dreams, reflection AND HAZARD and intuition, EROS above all. . . . Surrealism has been an embodiment of some kind, a luminous . . . haunting. It is the name of the country where I was born."

Awards Arts and Letters Award in Literature, American Academy of Arts and Letters (2008) Lannan Literary Award for Fiction (2004) Charles Flint Kellogg Award in Arts and Letters (1998) Critics Choice Award (1995) The Word 'Desire (1997) The One Marvelous Thing (2008)Poetry From The Star Chamber (as "Rikki") Fiddlehead Poetry Books, Fredericton NB (1974) Wild Geraniums Actual Size Press, London (1975) Bouche a Bouche by Guy Ducornet & Rikki, Soror, Paris (1975) Weird Sisters (as "Rikki") Intermedia, Vancouver (1976) Knife Notebook (as "Rikki") Fiddlehead Poetry Books, Vancouver (1977) The Illustrated Universe (as "Rikki") Aya Press, Toronto (1979) The Cult of Seizure The Porcupine's Quill, Erin, Ontario (1989)Essays The Monstrous and the Marvelous City Lights, San Francisco (1999) The Deep Zoo Coffee House Press, Minneapolis (2015)Anthologies edited Shoes & Shit: Stories for Pedestrians edited by Geoff Hancock & Rikki Ducornet, Aya Press, Toronto (1984)Children's books The Blue Bird Adaptation of Mme. D'Aulnoy's old French fairy tale, Alfred A. Knopf, New York (1970) Shazira Shazam and the Devil by Erica and Guy Ducornet, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey (1972)Illustrations Spanking the Maid by Robert Coover (1981) Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius by Jorge Luis Borges (1983) Torn Wings and Faux Pas by Karen Elizabeth Gordon (1997) Horse, Flower, Bird by Kate Bernheimer (2010) ForewordsSurrealist Experiences: 1001 Dawns, 221 Midnights, by Penelope Rosemont. Black Swan Press (2000) Hum, by Michelle Richmond. Fiction Collective Two (2014)