19 Facts About Kathy Acker

Kathy Acker's writing incorporates pastiche and the cut-up technique, involving cutting-up and scrambling passages and sentences; she defined her writing as existing in the post-nouveau roman European tradition.

Kathy Acker's family was from a wealthy, assimilated German-Jewish background that was culturally but not religiously Jewish.

Kathy Acker's maternal grandmother, Florence Weill, was an Austrian Jew who had inherited a small fortune from her husband's glove-making business.

Kathy Acker's grandparents went into political exile from Alsace-Lorraine prior to World War I, due to the rising nationalism of pre-Nazi Germany, moving to Paris and then to the United States.

Kathy Acker was raised in her mother and stepfather's home in the Sutton Place neighborhood of Manhattan's prosperous Upper East Side.

Kathy Acker had a half-sister, Wendy, by her mother's second marriage, but the two women were never close and long estranged.

Kathy Acker attended the Lenox School, a private school for girls on the Upper East Side.

Kathy Acker became interested in writing novels and, with Robert, moved to California to attend University of California, San Diego, where David Antin, Eleanor Antin, and Jerome Rothenberg were among her teachers.

In 1996, Kathy Acker left San Francisco and moved to London to live with the writer and music critic Charles Shaar Murray.

Kathy Acker found appealing the claim that instead of being an object of knowledge, as in Western medicine, the patient becomes a seer, a seeker of wisdom, that illness becomes the teacher and the patient the student.

Kathy Acker was associated with the New York punk movement of the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Kathy Acker was influenced by the Black Mountain School poets, William S Burroughs, David Antin, Carolee Schneeman, Eleanor Antin, French critical theory, mysticism, and pornography, as well as classic literature.

Kathy Acker dedicated Empire of the Senseless to her tattooist.

Kathy Acker wrote a text on the photographer Marcus Leatherdale that was published in 1983, in an art catalogue for the Molotov Gallery in Vienna.

Kathy Acker first began composing the book in 1973 while living in Solana Beach, writing and drawing fragments in notebooks before compiling the manuscript in 1979.

Kathy Acker published the German court judgment against Blood and Guts in High School in Hannibal Lecter, My Father.

Kathy Acker published Empire of the Senseless in 1988, and considered it a turning point in her writing.

Grove Press published two unpublished early novellas in the volume Rip-Off Red, Girl Detective and The Burning Bombing of America, and a collection of selected work, Essential Kathy Acker, edited by Amy Scholder and Dennis Cooper in 2002.

Between May 1,2019 and August 4,2019, the exhibition I, I, I, I, I, I, I, Kathy Acker was held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London.