Karen Malpede, playwright, writer, co-founder Theater Three Collaborative. Her page.

online interview - BOOK Q&As with Deborah Kalb

CHICAGO BOOK REVIEW

Malpede’s writing style is extraordinary for its emotional intelligence and its formal daring. She moves between the confessional and the collective, merging memoir with cultural history. In the same breath that she recounts personal violation, she illuminates the radical theater scene of 1960s and ’70s New York—The Living Theatre, Judith Malina, Julian Beck, and a generation of artists who believed art could end war. For readers who appreciate the way Toni Morrison or Audre Lorde fuse the political and the poetic, Malpede’s syntax carries similar conviction. She makes language itself an act of rebellion.--Faith Williams

MANHATTAN BOOK REVIEW

 Karen Malpede’s Last Radiance: Radical Lives, Bright Deaths is a sweeping and deeply humane memoir that spans six decades of love, art, and political witness. It is as much a personal elegy as it is a cultural chronicle: a map of radical theater and moral conviction drawn through one woman’s intertwined encounters with death and creation. What emerges is not only the portrait of a pioneering playwright but also a meditation on the endurance of conscience.
--Jessica Fahey

ANOTHER EYE OPENS REVIEW

Karen Malpede’s wild and emotionally affecting Last Radiance: Radical Lives, Bright Deaths comes in four sections, each one deep and dense enough to be a book in itself. It is a theater memoir, a love story, an essay about grief, and a polemic about cancer treatment all in one volume – raw, tender, honest, passionate, and exceptionally intimate.
--Don Shewey

Advance Praise:

"Illness is a metaphor for our anguished world, as Karen Malpede’s harrowing and haunting, but also joyful, Last Radiance makes clear. Malpede’s memoir of a life lived in the cultural avant-garde is a rare book that forces us to sit with death and despair, and in the process teaches us new ways to be alive. We’ve become numb to the word cancer, as we have to war. Malpede’s honest, limpid prose forces us to feel again, not merely to assign meaning to sickness – our own and that of our loved ones -- but to see sickness in its social totality. A bracing and true book."
-Greg Grandin, Pulitzer Prize winning author The End of the Myth, America, America

"A wonderful, important book about the theater and about love."
-Kathleen Chalfant, award winning stage and screen actor

"Karen Malpede's Last Radiance is a stunning work -- a book that somehow manages to be a coming of age story, a memoir of deep love and searing loss, and a sweeping cultural history of New York City avant-garde theater and activism spanning from the 1960s to the present. Malpede's voice is strong and her eyes are clear; she examines her own history through a well-earned, unafraid lens, looking at everything, knowing fully what is important. If only we were all this devoted -- to love, to art, to writing, to seeing the world so clearly. A deep, moving work; Malpede's story will stay with me."
-Nellie Herman, author, The Cure for Grief, Season of Migration

"Lucky you to have found this book by playwright Karen Malpede!  Here in lies a deeply human secret history; a poetic memoir of the American avant-garde.

This is a world of magic and passion that only someone who lived it can transmit. No dry academic theories here ! This is a jewel box of lived politics, lived aesthetics, lived poetry and lived art that is disappearing. Savor it! Carry the history."
-Penny Arcade, performance artist

Recent writtings:
Mourning the love of one’s life

Other News

Here are some links and some quick news:

Wikipedia - Karen Malpede

Egret acting editions: Blue Valiant and Other Than We.

Also, Troy Too may be having another production in CA.

And, I have a commission to write a play for a theater in Santa Monica.

I am researching and writing about Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, reproductive freedom and the creative life.

Vine Leaves Press