Skip to content
The Jewish Hall of Fame
The collection
Portrait of Kathy Acker

CorkyPleasures · CC BY-SA 4.0

Kathy Acker

American novelist, playwright, essayist

1947 – 1997aged 50

An experimental novelist who built her fiction from cut-up and pastiche techniques borrowed from William Burroughs, scrambling and recombining passages to write about trauma, sexuality, and identity in deliberately transgressive terms. Working in a postmodern lineage descended from the French nouveau roman, she became one of the defining voices of American literary punk.

Fields

Source and further reading