Join us on Saturday 19 September, 4-7pm for the Gloucestershire book launch for Alice Butler’s creative-critical book Close Writing: Kathy Acker, Cookie Mueller, and Love-In-Pieces(Duke University Press, 2026).

Alice will give an illustrated, performative reading, followed by an in-conversation with artist Holly Antrum. There will be drinks in the gallery and discounted copies of the book will be available for purchase.

The event is free but please sign up for a ticket using the form below so have an idea of numbers:

More about the book…

In Close Writing, Alice Butler 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.

About Alice…

Alice Butler is a Stroud-based writer and interdisciplinary scholar who specialises in the

intersections of recent and contemporary feminist and queer art, writing, and theoretical

practices. She works 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 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.