Dodie Bellamy is a novelist, poet, and essayist who has published numerous books and a handful of chapbooks. She specializes in genre-bending work that focuses on feminism, sexuality, cultural artifacts both high and low, and all things queer. Bellamy champions the vulnerable, the fractured, the disenfranchised, the fucked-up. She believes the spiritual and the political can be found in the most unlikely places. She loves the essay as a form, feeling it can encompass everything; it's the closest prose can get to poetry without mimicking it.
In 2018-19, Bellamy was the subject of the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art’s On Our Mind program, a year-long series of public events, commissioned essays, and reading group meetings inspired by an artist’s writing and lifework. As part of her season, the Wattis sponsored a year of Mirage/Period[ical], the monthly Xeroxed zine she and her husband Kevin Killian published 155 issues of between 1992 and 2009. Charles Bernstein once said that Mirage/Period[ical] represented the absolute low end of high art, a compliment Bellamy and Killian embraced.
In October 2021, Semiotext(e) simultaneously published a new collection of essays, Bee Reaved, as well as a new edition of her 1998 PoMo vampire novel, The Letters of Mina Harker. Bee Reaved explores how grief ushers in new states of being and community. The Letters of Mina Harker resuscitates the female protagonist from Bram Stoker’s Dracula, who cohabits Dodie’s body in late 20th century San Francisco, wreaking havoc. Think sex, death, trashy movies, body horror, and endless lampooning of theory-speak.
In 2015, Semiotext(e) published When the Sick Rule the World, Bellamy’s third collection of memoirs/essays, following Pink Steam (2004) and Academonia (2006). When the Sick Rule the World centers around questions of health and illness, both personal and societal. The book ends in tech-colonized San Francisco, with an urban witch performing a ritual that rips up the sidewalks. A chapbook version of one of the pieces in the collection, The Beating of Our Hearts, was included in the 2014 Whitney Biennial.
With Kevin Killian, Bellamy edited Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative 1977-1997 for Nightboat Books, published in 1997. This first major anthology of New Narrative writing contains the work of forty-two recognized and little-known authors. Struggling to come up with snappy copy to describe New Narrative, Bellamy and Killian hailed it as “the movement fueled by punk, pop, porn, French theory, and social struggle to change writing forever.” They launched their book at City Lights in San Francisco, and later took the anthology to Oakland, Berkeley, Los Angeles, Orono (Maine), Portland (Oregon), New York, Paris, Cambridge, and Glasgow.
Since the early '80s, Bellamy has been an active member of San Francisco's literary avant-garde and is one of the original practitioners of New Narrative. From 1995 to 2000, she was the director of Small Press Traffic Literary Arts Center, and for twelve years before that, she and Kevin Killian curated a reading series there as volunteers. From 1999 to 2004, she was a regular book reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle. Her and Killian’s papers are collected at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, alongside the papers of Sam D’Allesandro.
Bellamy has close ties to the art world and has collaborated with many artists. She has written pieces for exhibits at SFMOMA, the Contemporary Jewish Museum, the Berkeley Art Museum, the Fales Library and Special Collections, and various galleries in the US and Europe. She was a guest columnist for SFMOMA’s Open Space, and has published in Frieze, ArtForum, and Mousse. She has written creative essays for several art catalogues. The exhibit she curated of Kathy Acker's clothes was staged both at New Langton Arts in San Francisco and at White Columns in New York.
Though not a prizes and awards type writer, Bellamy received a SF Bay Guardian Goldie Award for Literature and, for Cunt-Ups, a Firecracker Alternative Book Award. Time Out New York named Barf Manifesto "Best Book Under 30 Pages" for 2009.
Bellamy currently teaches at California College of the Arts in Undergrad Writing & Literature, and in Grad Fine Arts. She also teaches privately.