Chris Kraus will read from and describe the research process behind her new biography After Kathy Acker, on the life, myth, and influence of avant-garde artist, writer, and counter-cultural heroine Kathy Acker. Kraus will be joined in conversation with art writer and editor, Bruce Hainley. Book signing to follow.

"Although Kraus was present for Acker’s life, even inspired by her work, she is not what you would call a “partisan,” and because of this she has written the smartest, cruelest, most intimately clinical, which is to say the best, biography of Acker one could hope for. It is, perhaps, a better book than Acker herself could have written had the tables been turned—though the idea of Acker telling a story other than her own seems laughable—and so it may be that this book, like most great books, is both the perfect panegyric and revenge."

-DAVID VELASCO, BOOK FORUM

Chris Kraus is a writer and critic. Kraus is the author of I Love Dick, Where Art Belongs, Torpor, Summer of Hate, Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness, LA Artland: Contemporary Art from Los Angeles, and Aliens & Anorexia, and co editor of Hatred of Capitalism: A Semiotext(e) Reader. Index called her “one of the most subversive voices in American fiction.” Her work has been praised for its damning intelligence, vulnerability and dazzling speed.

Bruce Hainley is a writer, contributing editor of Artforum, and the associate chair of Graduate Art at ArtCenter College of Design. In conjunction with the first European survey of Larry Johnson, he edited Commie Pinko Guy, a reader about the artist's work. He is the author of, most recently, Under the Sign of [sic]: Sturtevant's Volte-Face, which the New York Times called "brilliant" and "sinuous."