Join us at EBB for a special evening with author and researcher Alice Butler, launching her latest publication *Close Writing* (DUP), in conversation with Nell Osborne.

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.

BIOS

Alice Butler is a writer and interdisciplinary scholar who specialises in the intersections of recent and contemporary feminist and queer art, writing, and theoretical practices. She teaches in the School of Arts and Humanities 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. 

Nell Osborne is a poet, novelist and researcher of experimental writing. In 2024, she published a poetry pamphlet, *Thank You For Everything*, with Monitor Books and co-edited *Gestures: a body of work, a cross-disciplinary anthology on gesture and feminist practice*, published with MUP. In 2026, she published her first novel, *Ghost Driver* with Moist Books.

Entry requirements: no age restrictions (under 18s to be accompanied by an adult over 21yrs, 1:1 ratio) — Read more — Read less