News Release

San Francisco - In commemoration of World AIDS Day, the James C. Hormel Center of the San Francisco Public Library will host a reading at 2:00pm on Sunday, December 1 to honor the 10th anniversary of the death of Steve Abbott, influential San Francisco poet, critic, and writer who died of AIDS in 1992. His daughter Alysia Abbott will be joined by writers Dodie Bellamy, Kevin Killian, Bob Gluck and others in remembering Steve Abbott's life and work.

The reading will be held in the Latino/Hispanic Community Meeting Room of the San Francisco Main Library, 100 Larkin Street (at Grove near Market), Civic Center.

Steve Abbott was a widely respected and prominent member of San Francisco's literary and gay community for nearly two decades. After moving to the City in 1973, he taught writing at University of San Francisco, served as managing editor of Poetry Flash, wrote a weekly column for the San Francisco Sentinel, and contributed to the San Francisco Weekly and the Advocate. Abbott published five volumes of poetry, three novels, and a collection of essays while also tirelessly promoting writers on the fringe before dying of AIDS related complications on December 2, 1992.

The San Francisco Weekly's Dennis Harvey wrote, "[Though] never much of a self-promoter, his [works] remain more intriguing than those of many better-known contemporaries."

In 1999 Alysia Abbott created www.steveabbott.org the award-winning Web site devoted to the life and work of her father. Her essay "The Perils of Knowing" appears in the anthology Out of the Ordinary, Essays on Growing up with Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Parents, 2000 (St. Martin's Press), which won the Lambda literary award in 2000. Abbott is currently working on a book about growing up with Steve.

Dodie Bellamy is the author of The Letters of Mina Harker (Hard Press, 1998), and co-author with the late Sam D'Allesandro of Real (Talisman House, 1994), an epistolary collaboration on AIDS, among other books. In 1998, she and husband Kevin Killian won the San Francisco Bay Guardian "Goldie" Award for Literature. With Killian, she has edited over 100 issues of the literary/art zine Mirage #4/Period(ical).

Kevin Killian is a playwright and the author of fifteen books of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction including Poet Be Like God: Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance, with Lewis Ellingham (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press), 1998 and Shy, which was nominated for Best Novel, Lambda Literary Awards, 1990.

Robert Glück is the author of eight books of poetry and fiction, most recently the acclaimed novels Margery Kempe and Jack the Modernist. Gluck was Director of the Poetry Center at San Francisco State, where he is currently an associate professor.

The reading will be hosted by the San Francisco Public Library's James C. Hormel Gay and Lesbian Center, which houses Steve Abbott's papers. The Hormel Center is devoted to the documentation of lesbian and gay history and culture by collecting, preserving and providing access to material on all aspects of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender experience. The center is named for James C. Hormel, the local philanthropist and community leader, whose donation created an endowment to ensure the collection's ongoing development.

The World AIDS Day event is free and open to the public.

For more details about the reading, please call
(415) 557-4277