Close Writing: Kathy Acker, Cookie Mueller and Love-in-Pieces

This event celebrates the publication of Dr Alice Butler’s (SoAH) monograph Close Writing: Kathy Acker, Cookie Mueller and Love-in-Pieces (Duke University Press, 2026), which reflects on the diaries, letters, publications, performances, lives, and afterlives of her most beloved queer feminist writers: Kathy Acker and Cookie Mueller. While the transgressive avant-garde writer Kathy Acker has developed a cult following in the decades since her death in the late-90s, the actress and writer Cookie Mueller has remained relatively obscure. In this creative-critical study, Butler participates and responds to the lives and writings of her shared “beloved," reimagining the scene of the archive as a scene of triangulated and bittersweet love that traverses the boundaries of life and death. She draws on the autofictional strategies that Acker and Mueller pioneered in their own experimental writings and performances, encountering the women in intimate theoretical spaces of sensuality, sexuality, and sickness that slip between life and text. By encountering Acker and Mueller as transgressors and innovators, but also as beloved figures in her writing life whom she addresses in love letters, Butler brings readers to new, reparative textures of understanding, embodiment, and affection through close writing.

Alice will give an illustrated reading from the book, followed by an in-conversation with Professor of Performance and Visual Culture at Queen Mary University, Dominic Johnson.

A wine reception will follow the talk where discounted copies of the book will be available for purchase.

“Close Writing is a book as much about Kathy Acker and Cookie Mueller as it is about the process of writing towards them. This allows a self-reflexive, painfully close analysis of what it is to pursue the objects of one’s critical affection, fanaticism, or love. Alice Butler is an excellent, compelling, and challenging writer. There’s magic here, in the precision and clarity, and in the imaginative entrance into her subjects’ writings and lives.” — Dominic Johnson, Professor of Performance and Visual Culture, Queen Mary University of London

Biographies

Alice Butler is a writer and interdisciplinary scholar who specialises in the intersections of recent and contemporary feminist and queer art, writing, and theoretical practices. She teaches in the School of Arts and Humanities at the Royal College of Art. Her creative and critical (often cross-genre/cross-historical) work activates reparative forms of correspondence to get closer to embodied states, encounters, and scenes of writing, desire, sickness, and love. She regularly publishes her work across scholarly and creative outputs and contexts, with recent epistolary-themed essays appearing in the journal Bricks from the Kiln, the anthology Correspondences de Appel 1975–2025, and the exhibition catalogue Lifeblood: Munch and the Medicalization of Modern Life. Articles on the lives and works of women artists such as Nan Goldin, Cookie Mueller, and Kathy Acker have also appeared (or are soon to appear) in anthologies on women’s fashion photography, art and the critical medical humanities, and the autobiographical impulse in contemporary art, respectively. She is co-editor of Gestures: A body of work (Manchester University Press, 2025), which includes her article on Francesca Woodman’s ‘autoerotic attentions’. Her monograph Close Writing: Kathy Acker, Cookie Mueller, and Love-in-pieces was published by Duke University Press in 2026. She is currently at work on a new book that explores the lives and afterlives of stockings and pantyhose in 1970s–80s feminist art practices.

Dominic Johnson is a writer and curator. He recently curated the touring exhibition Hamad Butt: Apprehensions at Irish Museum of Modern Art and Whitechapel gallery (2024-25); and is the author or editor of ten books including most recently Unlimited Action: The Performance of Extremity in the 1970s (2019). He is Professor of Performance and Visual Culture at Queen Mary University of London.