Kate Zambreno

Photo Credit: Heather Sten

Kate Zambreno is the author of eight books, most recently the novel Drifts (Riverhead) and a study of Hervé Guibert, To Write As If Already Dead (Columbia University Press). Esquire has called her "one of our most formally ambitious writers" and Publishers Weekly named her "a master of the experimental lyric essay." Zambreno's first publication was the 2009 novella O Fallen Angel, chosen by Lidia Yuknavitch for the "Undoing the Novel" context for the Portland-based Chiasmus Press, which was later reissued with Harper Perennial (2017), along with the novel Green Girl (2014), originally also published by a small press (2011), and seen as catalyzing a conversation about “unlikable characters” in contemporary writing. Heroines, which collages a heightened memoir next to biographical portraits of the "mad wives" and mistresses of literary modernism, was published in fall 2011 by Chris Kraus and Hedi El-Kholti as part of Semiotext(e)'s Active Agents imprint. The book inspired critical roundtables, reading groups, scholarly articles and essays, as well as performances. It has been named as one of the “50 Books that Define the Past 5 Years in Literature,” one of the “21 Books by and About Women that Every Man Should Read,” an “Essential Feminist Manifesto,” and “50 Greatest Books by Women.” Heroines was seen as ushering in a new subjective criticism that was formed partially by being online. Following Heroines, Zambreno was a visiting writer at many colleges and universities, including at CalArts, The University of Chicago, and at the University of Pennsylvania for their Feminism/s series. As a visiting artist at Naropa, for their “Violence and Community Symposium” curated by Bhanu Kapil, Zambreno created, in collaboration with her partner John Vincler, a series of hot pink silk pupae sculptures hung from the façade as a triptych on the campus’s central building. The talk for this event, "Apoplexia, Toxic Shock, and Toilet Bowl: Some Notes on Why I Write" was published as a chapbook by Sarah McCarry's Guillotine series. Around this time Zambreno was also a prose editor at Nightboat Books, publishing Bhanu Kapil, and volunteered for the feminist avant-garde collective Belladonna, in New York City at Dixon Place as well as at the AWP conference in Washington D.C. She ran a series of readings and conversations called “Prose Event,” featuring the writers Renee Gladman, Amina Cain, Danielle Dutton, among others, and published pamphlets to coincide with the events.

Book of Mutter, the book-length essay on grief and the mother, worked on for a decade, inspired by Louise Bourgeois's Cells and the worlds of Henry Darger, was published in March 2017, by Semiotext(e)’s Native Agents. Zambreno embarked on a series of talks exploring ongoingness, photography, motherhood and literature, later collected in the subsequent volume, Appendix Project, also published by Semiotext(e)'s Native Agents. Appendix lectures were given at Duke University, the Renaissance Society at University of Chicago, Printed Matter in New York, Cal Arts, and at Washington University as the first “The Critic as Artist/The Artist as Critic” Hurst Visiting Professor. Summer 2019 saw the publication of a collection of flash pieces and long-form essays at Harper Perennial, Screen Tests, four of which were published in the Spring issue of The Paris Review. Screen Tests included several formally innovative pieces that engaged with forms of visual art, like the texts originally commissioned for a collaboration with the artist B. Ingrid Olson for a solo exhibition at the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo, New York. Screen Tests collects long form essays, including on the writer/director Barbara Loden, on Kathy Acker for Feminist Press’ Icon anthology, and on the conceptual photographer Anne Collier. Zambreno has participated in two performances circling around Kathy Acker—reenacting Acker’s original reading of Blood and Guts in High School for an event at the Museum of Modern Art, restaging the “Cine-Virus” film program from the 70s curated by Kathryn Bigelow and Michael Oblowitz, and performing a piece commissioned by the WdW Review as part of the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam in the Classroom series at the New York Art Book Fair at MoMA PS1. I. Zambreno writes frequently about art, including a 2019 catalogue essay on the painter Paula Rego written for a traveling UK retrospective. An essayistic novel, Drifts—an intimate portrait of reading, writing, and creative obsession that circles in part around the life of Rainer Maria Rilke writing Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, as well as meditates on neighborhood, animals, literature, photography, friendship, and pregnancy—was published by Riverhead in May 2020. Drifts, though classified as fiction, is a difficult book to categorize and troubles boundaries of genre. Drifts was reviewed widely, including in The New Yorker and The New York Times. Zambreno's study of the writer Hervé Guibert, considered through the contemporary framework of living in the city amidst the pandemic, is forthcoming in June from Columbia University Press as part of their “Rereadings” series. The work, a diptych that is part novella and part critical notebook, won a Robert B. Silvers grant for works-in-progress from The New York Review of Books. Zambreno's books have been translated into Spanish, Japanese, Swedish, Dutch and Turkish.

For the past eight years Zambreno has taught seminars and workshops on disobedient forms, the fragment, time, notebooks, and writing the visual as an adjunct in the writing programs at Columbia University and Sarah Lawrence College. In February 2020 she gave a talk on the grief journals and films of artist and writer David Wojnarowicz, as part of the Harvard Divinity School’s Center for World Religion’s “Poetry, Philosophy, and Religion” series. In the fall of 2020, she was the Distinguished Visiting Writer in Nonfiction at the University of Idaho. Zambreno is currently the Strachan Donnelley Chair in Environmental Writing at Sarah Lawrence College, and additionally teaches in the graduate nonfiction program at Columbia University.

Zambreno is now at work on an essay collection, The Missing Person, forthcoming from Riverhead. The title essay, about Kafka’s early attempts at writing in his journal while traveling with Max Brod through Europe amidst the cholera epidemic, was published by the Virginia Quarterly Review. She is at work on a novel on softness and trauma entitled Foam. Zambreno lives with John Vincler, their two daughters, Leo and Rainer, and their terrier, Genet, in the Ditmas Park neighborhood of Brooklyn. Zambreno is a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Nonfiction.

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