Dodie Bellamy gave a Visiting Writer Reading at the Arts Research Center in April 2022, part of the Spring 2022 Flash Reading Series.
Dodie Bellamy is a novelist, poet, and essayist with an extensive body of work that includes many books and a handful of chapbooks. Her writing is known for its genre-bending approach, focusing on feminism, sexuality, cultural artifacts, and all things queer. She champions the vulnerable, the fractured, the disenfranchised, and the troubled. Bellamy believes that the spiritual and the political can be discovered in the most unexpected places. She has a deep appreciation for the essay form, seeing it as the closest prose can get to poetry without directly mimicking it.
In the 2018-19 period, Bellamy was featured in the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art’s On Our Mind program, which included a series of public events, commissioned essays, and reading group meetings inspired by her writing and life work. During this time, the Wattis Institute sponsored a year of Mirage/Period[ical], the monthly Xeroxed zine she and her husband, Kevin Killian, published from 1992 to 2009. Charles Bernstein once remarked that Mirage/Period[ical] represented the absolute low end of high art, a comment Bellamy and Killian take as a compliment.
In October 2021, Semiotext(e) published two new works by Bellamy: a collection of essays titled Bee Reaved and a new edition of her 1998 PoMo vampire novel, The Letters of Mina Harker. Bee Reaved delves into how grief leads to new states of being and community, while The Letters of Mina Harker reimagines the female protagonist from Bram Stoker’s Dracula, who now cohabits with Bellamy’s body in late 20th-century San Francisco, causing mayhem. The novel explores themes of sex, death, trashy movies, body horror, and the satirical critique of theory-speak.
Bellamy’s third collection of memoirs/essays, When the Sick Rule the World, was published by Semiotext(e) in 2015. This collection, following Pink Steam (2004) and Academonia (2006), focuses on issues of health and illness, both personal and societal. The book concludes with a ritual performed by an urban witch in tech-colonized San Francisco, tearing up the sidewalks. A chapbook version of one of the pieces, The Beating of Our Hearts, was featured in the 2014 Whitney Biennial.
Together with Kevin Killian, Bellamy edited Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative 1977-1997, published by Nightboat Books in 1997. This anthology, the first major collection of New Narrative writing, includes works by forty-two recognized and lesser-known authors. The anthology was described by Bellamy and Killian as “the movement fueled by punk, pop, porn, French theory, and social struggle to change writing forever.” They launched the book at City Lights in San Francisco and subsequently took it on a tour to cities including Oakland, Berkeley, Los Angeles, Orono (Maine), Portland (Oregon), New York, Paris, Cambridge, and Glasgow.
Since the early 80s, Bellamy has been an active participant in San Francisco's literary avant-garde and is one of the original practitioners of New Narrative. She served as the director of Small Press Traffic Literary Arts Center from 1995 to 2000 and, prior to that, curated a reading series there with Kevin Killian as a volunteer for twelve years. From 1999 to 2004, she was a regular book reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle. The papers of Bellamy and Killian are housed at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, along with the papers of Sam D’Allesandro.
Bellamy has strong connections to the art world and has collaborated with numerous artists. Her writing has appeared in 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, among other venues. She also curated an exhibit of Kathy Acker's clothes, which was staged at both New Langton Arts in San Francisco and White Columns in New York.
Although not particularly focused on awards, Bellamy has received notable recognition, including a SF Bay Guardian Goldie Award for Literature and a Firecracker Alternative Book Award for Cunt-Ups. Barf Manifesto was named "Best Book Under 30 Pages" for 2009 by Time Out New York.
Currently, Dodie Bellamy teaches at the California College of the Arts in both the Undergraduate Writing & Literature and Graduate Fine Arts programs. She also teaches privately.