Kevin Killian

Kevin Killian (1952–2019) was a San Francisco-based poet, novelist, playwright, and art writer. Recent books include Selected Amazon Reviews (2024) and the poetry collections Elements (2017), Tony Greene Era (2017), and Tweaky Village (2014). He is the coauthor of Poet Be Like God: Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance (1998). With Dodie Bellamy, he co-edited Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative Writing, 1977–1997 (2017).

September 2025Poetry

three poems from PADAM PADAM

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Kevin Killian (1952–2019) was a San Francisco-based poet, novelist, playwright, and art writer. Recent books include Selected Amazon Reviews (2024) and the poetry collections Elements (2017), Tony Greene Era (2017), and Tweaky Village (2014). He is the coauthor of Poet Be Like God: Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance (1998). With Dodie Bellamy, he co-edited Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative Writing, 1977–1997 (2017).

November 2017Critics Page

For A Reason

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Like many artists, I came to San Francisco from graduate school, without any real training in doing anything, and I took a series of temp jobs.
Kevin Killian in Boulder, photo by Anne Tardos.

November 2017Books

An Increased Clarity of Address: KEVIN KILLIAN with Tony Leuzzi

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“That’s an awful lot of me,” Kevin Killian observed when I sent him proofs of the interview that follows this introduction—“Do we need it all?” On the surface, such candid self-effacement seems unlikely in a writer whose work is so searching and confident, but Killian’s apparent lack of ego may be connected to his fascination with makeshift art.
Kevin Killian

I Love John GiornoBALLING BUDDHA

AIDS TREATMENT PROJECT

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John Giorno’s Subduing Demons in America: Selected Poems 1962–2007, ably edited by Marcus Boon, first allowed me a chance to grasp the whole nettle of Giorno’s career in poetry—its shape, its energy, its paideuma, as Pound (following Frobenius), used the word.
WE SHALL LIVE AGAIN: A BENEFIT FOR AIDS TREATMENT PROJECT, 1987.

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