Launch For Beautiful Aliens: A Steve Abbott Reader — February 24th, 2020

the Poetry Project Podcast

Monday Reading Series: A Steve Abbott Reader— February 24th, 2020 Hosted by Kyle Dacuyan. Join us in celebration of Beautiful Aliens: A Steve Abbott Reader (Nightboat Books, 2019) edited by Jamie Townsend, with an afterword by Alysia Abbott. In this long awaited, first ever retrospective of Steve Abbott's work you'll find writing, illustrations, and comics by this Gay Liberation hero and foundational Bay Area underground writer. Throughout the night we'll hear from the book's editor Jamie Townsend; Steve Abbott's daughter, Alysia Abbott; as well as friends, correspondents, and admirers of Abbott including Nayland Blake, Alexander Chee, Todd Colby, Ariel Goldberg, Hugh Ryan, Rakesh Satyal and Sarah Schulman. About Beautiful Aliens: A Steve Abbott Reader— The first retrospective collection of writing, illustrations, and comics by a hero of the Gay Liberation movement and Bay Area underground writing. Beautiful Aliens: A Steve Abbott Reader (Nightboat Books, 2019) is a landmark collection representing the visionary life's work of beloved Bay Area luminary Steve Abbott. It brings together a broad cross-section of literary and artistic work spanning three decades of poetry, fiction, collage, comics, essays, and autobiography, including underground classics like, Lives of the Poets and Holy Terror, rare pieces of treasured ephemera, and previously unpublished material, representing a survey of Abbott's multivalent practice, as well as reinforcing his essential role within the contemporary canon of queer arts. Steve Abbott (1943—1992) was a poet, critic, editor, novelist, and artist based in San Francisco. Jamie Townsend is a genderqueer poet and editor living in Oakland. They are half-responsible for Elderly, an ongoing publishing experiment and hub of ebullience and disgust. They are the author of Pyramid Song (above/ground press, 2018), and Sex Machines (blush, 2019) as well as the full-length collection Shade (Elis Press, 2015). An essay on the history and influence of the literary magazine Soup was published in The Bigness of Things: New Narrative and Visual Culture (Wolfman Books, 2017). They are the editor of Beautiful Aliens: A Steve Abbott Reader (Nightboat, 2019) and Libertines in the Ante-Room of Love: Poets on Punk (Jet Tone, 2019).