Kate Zambreno

Kate Zambreno is the author of eight books, most recently the novel Drifts (Riverhead) and a study of Hervé Guibert, To Write As If Already Dead (Columbia University Press). Esquire has called her "one of our most formally ambitious writers" and Publishers Weekly named her "a master of the experimental lyric essay." Zambreno's first publication was the 2009 novella O Fallen Angel, chosen by Lidia Yuknavitch for the "Undoing the Novel" context for the Portland-based Chiasmus Press, which was later reissued with Harper Perennial (2017), along with the novel Green Girl (2014), originally also published by a small press (2011), and seen as catalyzing a conversation about "unlikable characters" in contemporary writing. Heroines, which collages a heightened memoir next to biographical portraits of the "mad wives" and mistresses of literary modernism, was published in fall 2011 by Chris Kraus and Hedi El-Kholti as part of Semiotext(e)'s Active Agents imprint. The book inspired critical roundtables, reading groups, scholarly articles and essays, as well as performances. It has been named as one of the "50 Books that Define the Past 5 Years in Literature," one of the "21 Books by and About Women that Every Man Should Read," an "Essential Feminist Manifesto," and "50 Greatest Books by Women." Heroines was seen as ushering in a new subjective criticism that was formed partially by being online. Following Heroines, Zambreno was a visiting writer at many colleges and universities, including at CalArts, The University of Chicago, and at the University of Pennsylvania for their Feminism/s series. As a visiting artist at Naropa, for their "Violence and Community Symposium" curated by Bhanu Kapil, Zambreno created, in collaboration with her partner John Vincler, a series of hot pink silk pupae sculptures hung from the façade as a triptych on the campus's central building. The talk for this event, "Apoplexia, Toxic Shock, and Toilet Bowl: Some Notes on Why I Write" was published as a chapbook by Sarah McCarry's Guillotine series. Around this time Zambreno was also a prose editor at Nightboat Books, publishing Bhanu Kapil, and volunteered for the feminist avant-garde collective Belladonna, in New York City at Dixon Place as well as at the AWP conference in Washington D.C. Sheran a series of readings and conversations called "Prose Event," featuring the writers Renee Gladman, Amina Cain, Danielle Dutton, among others, and published pamphlets to coincide with the events.