Kathy Acker’s Library

Kathy Acker’s impact as a writer and performer, a cultural figure, and an (often overlooked) academic is uniquely tangled: the innovations of her hybrid, transgressive literature, written between 1972 and 1996, baffled her contemporaries to a degree that, once didn’t signal an antitruth nihilism but a quest to subvert consciousness and challenge the rigidity of meaning, as she herself once put it. Her use of collage and appropriation raised questions that echo through today’s cultural landscape with striking urgency.