Kristen C. Gallagher

About

Kristen Gallagher is a multi-genre experimental writer and a faculty member in English and Creative Writing. Her books include 85% True/minor ecologies (2017), Grand Central (2016) and We Are Here (2011). A 2021 sound art collaboration with David Diaz (Human Scale), “hs341: 85% True/minor ecologies,” an infinitely generative audio piece using recorded sounds of Florida, is available through the Human Scale app. Videos from her project “An Exercise with Objects” can be found at Tagvverk, Air/Light, and Dīstantia. Other written work appears in Trilobite Bond, Peach Mag, The Baffler, and Air/Light.

She was awarded an Artist’s Grant from the New York State Council on the Arts in 2021 for a collaboration with filmmaker Tara Nelson titled “An Exercise with Objects.” Her hybrid work “Six Years in Florida” was a finalist for the 2020 Essay Press Creative Nonfiction contest. Selections from her book 85% True / minor ecologies appeared in the Best American Experimental Writing 2018 edited by Myung Mi Kim. She was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in Poetry in 2017.

She’s published literary and art critical essays in places like Art Papers, Jacket2, Crayon, Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts, and Reading the Difficulties: Dialogues with Contemporary American Innovative Poetry. She has produced numerous articles and presentations on writing pedagogy, experiential learning, and student alienation, which can be found in Radical Teacher, Hybrid Pedagogy, Paulo Freire Journal, Class and the College Classroom: Essays on Teaching, and Teachers College Record: Special Edition on Community College.

She began in color vision science, investigating the limits of perception. This evolved into an interest in the relationship of perception to language, which eventually became a focus on the evolution of literary forms from the grassroots practices of folklore and vernacular. Blending strategies from memoir, folklore, journalism, poetry, and horror, she plays with narrative conventions and the conditions of plausibility they set. Her primary methods of investigation draw on field research, real people, real situations and localities, and real voices whenever possible. Most of her writing concerns narrative form, weird cultural and ecological encounters, and the creative processes of truth-making and its relationship to survival.

She is also proud to serve as Vice Chair of the PSC-CUNY LaGuardia union chapter.