Carla Harryman is a poet, experimental prose writer, essayist, performance writer, and collaborator in multi-disciplinary performance. She is known for her boundary breaking investigations of genre, non/narrative poetics, and text-based performance that begin in early publications such as Under the Bridge (This Press, 1980) and three volumes of selected writings Animal Instincts: Prose Plays and Essays (This Press, 1989), There Never Was a Rose without a Thorn (City Lights, 1995), and Various Devices. She is the recipient of numerous awards and honors including an award from the Foundation of Contemporary Art, a grant (with Erling Wold) from OPERA America, an NEA Consortium Playwright Commission, an Alexander Gerbode Foundation Award, and a Headlands Center for the Arts Residency. Her work has been translated into many languages, including multiple publications in French and Russian. Her essays, poetry, prose, and plays have been represented in over thirty national and international anthologies.
Harryman’s Poets Theater, interdisciplinary, and bi-lingual performances have been presented nationally and internationally. In 2012 she performed (with pianist Magda Mayas) Occupying Theodor W. Adorno’s “Music and New Music,” a Re-performance, as the closing keynote of dOCUMENTA 13’s What Is Thinking program in Kassel, Germany.
Other key publications include Adorno’s Noise (2008), a radical experiment in the essay as form; The collaborative ten volume work, The Grand Piano: Experiments in Collective Autobiography, San Francisco 1975-1980 (completed in 2010), The Wide Road (2011) with Lyn Hejinian, an erotic picaresque in poetry and prose; and the diptych W—/M— (2013).
Carla Harryman was born in Southern California in 1952. In the mid-1970s she left Los Angeles for San Francisco where she became a founding figure of the Bay Area language writing and a co-founder of The San Francisco Bay Area Poets Theater, a collective project directed by Nick Robinson and Eileen Corder that ran from 1979-1986. In 1995, she moved from the Bay Area to Detroit. She currently divides her time between the Detroit area and Ypsilanti, where she serves as Professor in the Department of English at Eastern Michigan University. She has served on the MFA summer faculty of the Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College and on the faculty in the Department of English, Wayne State University. In 2019, she received the Ronald C. Collins Distinguished Faculty in Creative Activity Award from Eastern Michigan University.