Jason McBride - "Eat Your Mind" - Michael Dango

Jason McBride will discuss his book Eat Your Mind: The Radical Life and Work of Kathy Acker. He will be joined in conversation by Michael Dango.
Presented in partnership with the University of Chicago Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality
This event is free and open to the public.
About the book: Kathy Acker (1947–1997) was a rare and almost inconceivable thing: a celebrity experimental writer. Twenty-five years after her death, she remains one of the most original, shocking, and controversial artists of her era. The author of visionary, transgressive novels like Blood and Guts in High School; Empire of the Sensless; and Pussy, King of Pirates, Acker wrote obsessively about the treachery of love, the limitations of language, and the possibility of revolution. A feat of literary biography, Eat Your Mind is the first full-scale, authorized life of Acker. Drawing on exclusive interviews with hundreds of Acker’s intimates as well as her private journals, correspondence, and early drafts of her work, acclaimed journalist and critic Jason McBride offers a thrilling account and a long overdue reassessment of a misunderstood genius and revolutionary artist.
About the author: Jason McBride’s work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, New York magazine, The Believer, The Village Voice, The Globe and Mail (Toronto), Hazlitt, and many others. He lives in Toronto. Eat Your Mind is his first book.
About the interlocutor: Michael Dango is an assistant professor of English and Media Studies at Beloit College. He specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century U.S. art, literature, and queer and feminist theory. He is the author of Crisis Style: The Aesthetics of Repair (Stanford University Press, 2021), and other writings have appeared in Signs, differences, Artforum, and elsewhere.