Kathy Acker returns

Experimental writer Kathy Acker was always pushing boundaries, of both form and content. When she died of cancer in 1997, her work was still ahead of its time.

And now Acker has returned. This week, the Los Angeles-based publisher Les Figues Press announced the Kathy Acker Fellowship, a part-time, nine-month fellowship for “an emerging writer/artist, literary editor, or arts curator/organizer” operating in Acker’s tradition of “innovative, exceptional text-based practices.”

The fellow will write for the Les Figues blog, work on Les Figues publications and help organize two events about the intersection of language, art and social change. Both events are to take place at the MAK Center Schindler House in West Hollywood in 2015. The fellow will use Acker’s desk, located in the Les Figues office. Applications are now being accepted.

Acker’s books include “Blood and Guts in High School,” “My Mother, Demonology,” “In Memoriam to Identity” and “Kathy Goes to Haiti.”

Bomb magazine has posted a new short Acker piece, a frenetic, sexually frank email exchange between Acker and McKenzie Wark from 1995. The unlikely pair had a brief fling, followed by a hyper-engaged email correspondence.

Their entire correspondence appears in the book “I’m Very Into You,” out this month from Semiotext(e). The publisher describes it as “a Plato’s Symposium for the twenty-first century, but written for queers, transsexuals, nerds, and book geeks.”

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