Kathy Acker: The Last Interview

And Other Conversations

Edited by Amy Scholder and Douglas A. Martin

Kathy Acker was a punk-rock counter-cultural icon, and innovator of the literary underground. The interviews collected here span her amazing, uncompromising, and often misunderstood 30-year career.

From Acker’s earliest interviews—filled with playful, evasive, and counter-intuitive responses—to the last interview before her death, where she reflects on the state of American literature, these interviews capture the writer at her funny and surprising best. Another highlight includes Acker’s 1997 interview with the Spice Girls on the forces of pop and feminism (which reads as if it could have been conducted with a new generation of pop star in 2018).

KATHY ACKER (1947-1997) was a novelist, poet, essayist, and playwright. Her novels include Pussy, King of the Pirates, and Blood and Guts in High School. Her work is closely associated with punk rock and experimental aesthetics. She died of cancer in 1997.

AMY SCHOLDER has been editing and publishing progressive and literary books for over twenty years. She is currently producing with Sam Feder the documentary feature Disclosure: Trans Lives on Screen.

DOUGLAS A. MARTIN is the author of eight books across genres, including volumes of poetry and fiction. His latest book is Acker. He lives in Brooklyn.

“No writer I know is more audacious than Kathy Acker, whose anarchic wit drives a thoroughgoing attack on conventions and complacencies of all sorts. Not unlike Gertrude Stein in her day, Acker gives us a different way to look at the uses to which language is put.” ―Lynne Tillman

“Scarified sensibility, subversive intellect, and predatory wit make her a writer like no other I know.” —New York Times Book Review

“Acker may be the true mother of Brat Pack writers like Brett Easton Ellis, but there isn’t disgust in her work … Transgression is never disgust — it is a way of surviving.” —Jeanette Winterson