Wayne Koestenbaum has published eighteen books of poetry, criticism, and fiction, including Notes on Glaze, The Pink Trance Notebooks, My 1980s & Other Essays, Hotel Theory, Best-Selling Jewish Porn Films, Andy Warhol, Humiliation, Jackie Under My Skin, and The Queen’s Throat (a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist). His essays and poetry have appeared in The Best American Essays, The Best American Poetry, The New York Times, The New Yorker, London Review of Books, Artforum, The Paris Review, Harper’s, The Believer, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Cabinet, and many other periodicals and anthologies.  Koestenbaum has had solo exhibitions of his paintings at White Columns (New York), 356 Mission (Los Angeles), and the University of Kentucky Art Museum.  He has given musical performances at the Centre Pompidou, Walker Art Center, The Kitchen, REDCAT, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art;  his first piano/vocal solo record, Lounge Act, will be issued by Ugly Duckling Presse Records in 2017.  He wrote the libretto for Michael Daughterty’s opera Jackie O, which has been performed around the world and has been released on DVD by Dynamic Italy. Winner of a Whiting Award, Koestenbaum has taught at Yale (in the English department as well as in the School of Art’s painting department), and is a Distinguished Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and French at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City.

Living Writers Series Winter 2017 

Improvi/N\ations: Riff, Inquiry, and Protest 

Improvi/N\ations: Riff, Inquiry, and Protest will feature writers and artists who work and play across various disciplines and modes: poetry, prose, visual, sound, performance, art, and theory to address questions of race, gender, sexuality, and other identities. This series will explore the intersections of self-and-nationhood as fracture, memory and possibility via individual, collective and internal forms.

Humanities Lecture Hall, 206

Thursdays, 5:20-6:50 PM

All Readings are Free and Open to the Public

January 26: Wayne Koestenbaum, Distinguished Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and French, CUNY Graduate Center

February 2: Conner Bassett, Matthew Gervase, Kendall Grady, Courtney Kersten, Jared Harvey, Jose Antonio Villarán, Kirstin Wagner, PhD Candidates, Creative/Critical Concentration, Literature, UC Santa Cruz

February 16: Laura Mullen, McElveen Professor of English, Lousiana State University

February 23: Micah Perks, Professor of Creative Writing and Literature, UC Santa Cruz

March 9: Urayoán Noel, Associate Professor of English and Spanish, New York University

March 16: UCSC Creative Writing Program, Undergraduate Student Reading

Co-sponsored by The Humanities Division, Porter College George Hitchcock Poetry Endowment, The Literature Department and Creative Writing Program, Chicano Latino Research Center, Literary Cultures/Sawyer Seminar, Latin American and Latino Studies, and The Bay Tree Book Store