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Renee Gladman is a writer and artist preoccupied with crossings, thresholds, and geographies as they play out at the intersections of poetry, prose, drawing and architecture. She is the author of thirteen published works, including a cycle of novels about the city-state Ravicka and its inhabitants, the Ravickians—Event Factory (2010), The Ravickians (2011), Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge (2013) and Houses of Ravicka (2017)—as well as two collections of drawings, Prose Architectures (2017) and One Long Black Sentence, a series of white ink drawings on black paper, indexed by Fred Moten (2020). Recent essays and visual work have appeared in The Paris Review, Gulf Coast, Granta, Harper's, BOMB, e-flux, and n+1. She has been awarded fellowships, artist grants, and residencies from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Lannan Foundation, and KW Institute for Contemporary Art (Berlin), among others, and is the recipient of a 2021 Windham-Campbell prize in fiction. For more information, visit reneegladman.com
Photo credit: Philippe Mangeot-
Reviews
"Renee Gladman has always struck me as being a dreamer—she writes that way and the dreaming seems to construct the architecture of the world unfolding before our reading eyes."
Eileen Myles
"Gladman’s talent for linguistic architecture makes for a supple, tight promenade through heady ideas whose appeal rests on the implicit connection it draws between a people, their language, and the shape of communication."
Publishers Weekly
"She offers entry into a deliciously unsettling 'narrative,' really, a sort of adventure. She reassembles art she likes and makes new art—all in service of creating a new art 'experience,' suggesting a chain-letter of creation."
Olivia Cronk, Bookslut
"Her wrestling with the basic ideas of fiction—and its osmotic border with poetry—can lead to spectacular instances of art, passages at home in strangeness, maneuvering with uncanny grace in fields of indeterminacy and unknowing."
Eugene Lim
"Renee Gladman is an alchemist in the field of literary transubstantiation. She sculpts narrative and its medium, language, into near-bodily constructions that bring slowly into focus the sensory and intellectual complexities of navigating the space of writing and living and being a person in the world without betraying the physicality of those spaces. Her work gradually builds itself around you, the language of thinking and writing and being infused together through looping, penetrating prose, until you feel as though Gladman has begun to unlock the dichotomous borders separating our experiences of art and life."
Torin Jensen, Entropy Magazine
Reviews of books by Renee Gladman
Prose Architectures
Calamities -
Poems & essays
- Five Things from Calamities (in The Paris Review)
- "I Began the Day” from Calamities (in Harper’s)
- "Two Calamities” from Calamities (in Granta)
- "Five Things Right Now” (in Granta)
- "Two Calamities” from Calamities (in Granta)
- From Calamities (in a Perimeter)
- Number Five of the Eleven Calamities (at Prodigal)
- “Calamities” (at Triple Canopy)
- Number Six of the Eleven Calamities (at PEN)
- Six enclosures from Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge (in Brooklyn Rail)
- An excerpt from Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge and Gladman's artist statement (for the Foundation for Contemporary Arts)
- An excerpt from Event Factory (in Brooklyn Rail)
- An excerpt from The Ravickians (in Tarpaulin Sky)Interviews
- BOMB, with Zack Friedman
- BOMB, with Amina Cain
- The Volta, with Joshua Marie Wilkinson
- Triple Canopy, with Lucy Ives
- The Collagist, with Danielle Vogel -
Audio
- Renee Gladman's page on PennSound
- Recording of a 2006 panel with Bobbie Louise Hawkins, Bhanu Kapil Rider, and Laird Hunt at Naropa
- Part I and part II of a 2002 panel with Anne Waldman, Joanne Kyger, Harryette Mullen, and Steven Taylor at Naropa
Video
Reading for Small Press Traffic's 40th anniversary at Artists' Television Access
Reading for the Lannan Center Poets & Social Practice's Series at Georgetown University
