Kristin Prevallet (b. 1966) is an American poet, essayist, and teacher. Her poetic work incorporates conceptual writing and trance, and her performances are rooted in feminist performance art and spoken word. Everywhere Here and in Brooklyn, I, Afterlife: Essay in Mourning Time, and Trance Poetics are among her poetic books.[1]
Since the early 1990s, she has been teaching writing and literature courses for a variety of universities and art institutions including Bard College's Writing and Thinking Workshop, Pratt Institute, Naropa University, Poet's House, and The Poetry Project. From 2003 to 2006, she worked with Anne Waldman and Bob Holman to start a school for poets at the Bowery Poetry Club, the venue which defined the New York downtown poetry scene in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Prevallet's poem "Lyric Infiltration" from her second book Scratch Sides: Poetry, Documentation and Image-Text Projects is analyzed by Redell Olson in “Reading and Writing Through Found Materials: From Modernism to Contemporary Practice.”[2] Olson writes, "The use of the term ‘cut-up’ places Prevallet’s procedural work in relation to the strategies of previous writers such as Tristan Tzara, Brion Gysin, and the Oulipo founder Raymond Queneau, and can also be related to the chance-based operational writing of John Cage and Jackson Mac Low. The work of Prevallet is unusual in that it does not dispense with either the term ‘lyric’ or the process of lyric writing but uses it as a basis for her procedural work."[2]
Her work has been published in numerous anthologies including The Body in Language (CounterPath Press, edited by Edwin Torres), I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing By Women (University of Iowa Press), Women Poets on Mentorship: Efforts & Affections (Edited by Arielle Greenburg and Rachel Zucker, University of Iowa Press), and Telling it Slant: Avant-garde Poetics of the 1990s (edited by Mark Wallace, University of Alabama Press).
^ abOlsen, Redell (2010), "Reading and Writing Through Found Materials: From Modernism to Contemporary Practice", Teaching Modernist Poetry, Palgrave Macmillan UK, pp. 140–157, doi:10.1057/9780230289536_9, ISBN978-0-230-20233-7
^Burnett, Elizabeth-Jane (2017). A social biography of contemporary innovative poetry communities : the gift, the wager, and poethics. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN978-3-319-62295-8. OCLC1004348287.
^John Sims (October 8, 2011). Rhythm of Structure Catalogue – A John Sims Project. Selby Gallery, Ringling College of Art and Design. p. 7. Retrieved May 20, 2018.
