Kathy Acker

Kathy Acker (née Lehmann; April 18, 1947 – November 30, 1997) was an American experimental novelist, punk poet, playwright, essayist, postmodernist and sex-positive feminist writer. She was influenced by the Black Mountain School poets, the writer William S. Burroughs, the artist and theoretician David Antin, French critical theory, philosophy, mysticism, and pornography. 2Biography The daughter of Donald and Claire (Weill) Lehman, Kathy Acker was born Karen Alexander in New York City. There is some question as to her year of birth, 1947; the Library of Congress lists her birth year as 1948, but most obituaries state that she was born in 1944. The pregnancy was unplanned; Donald Lehman abandoned the family before Kathy was born, and her stepfather's name appears on the birth certificate. Her relationship with her domineering mother even into adulthood was fraught with hostility and anxiety because Acker felt unloved and unwanted. Her mother soon remarried, a union that Acker later characterized as an essentially passionless marriage to an ineffectual man, and Acker was raised in her mother and stepfather's home on New York’s prosperous Upper East Side. In 1966 she married Robert Acker, and changed her last name from Lehman to Acker. Although her birth name was Karen, she was known as Kathy by her friends and family. Her first work appeared in print as part of the burgeoning New York City literary underground of the mid-1970