Steve Abee

STEVE ABEE BIO

Steve Abee is from Santa Monica, CA. He is a true son of the Western Sun. He began writing after highschool when he held a job as an orderly at St. John’s Hospital. His mind started to unfold itself and he thought if he was going to save it he better start writing things down. " I saw the fragility and blessedness of lives and started to come apart in the wonderment of it all."

It's that same passion Steve conveys in his work. Known for his lucid

writing, Abee holds a ringside seat as Los Angeles' poet observing reporter;

documenting urban life for the tragically ironic beauty it often is. Steve Abee's work, whether heard live or read on paper, clearly displays a complex and dynamic combination of rhythm and intellect, the subersive and the traditional.

He writes in the American lyric tradition of Whitman and Kerouac, Yet, as numerous fans remark, experiencing Abee

perform his work in person is like a university lecture-- if Iggy Pop was the professor! Suffice it to say Abee is his own kind of American Literary experience.

BECK has praised STEVE ABEE as "the love-powered bullhorn blasting down from the altitudes."

Jerry Stahl, calls Abee’s work"...a naked celebration of love for the damaged and damaged love..."

Luis Alfaro. Playwright, Poet, Performance Artist and MacArthur Grant recipient calls Abee"A literary seer who speaks the language of billboards and boulevards, Abee elevates the experience of our neighborhoods to soliloquies laced wth the

celebratory bitter tongue of city life"

Lydia Lunch has remarked that his "... savage poetry demands the reader devour passage after passage, only to be left soul seared and simultaneously re-invigorated."

He attended UC Santa Cruz in the late eighties and worked closely with Lucille Clifton for two years before he dropped out and came back to Los Angeles where he worked as a cook, a cab driver, furniture mover, but mostly as a cook. Eventually Abee graduated from UCLA with a degree in English Literature. He received an MFA in Poetry and Fiction from at Antioch University in Los Angeles.

Abee has been writing and performing steadily since the 1980’s. His first reading was with Jack Skelley at the world famous Lhasa Club in Hollywood in 1984. He has read in all manner of joints, from the now defunct Al’s Bar RIP, we miss that place, and Onyx Community Coffee House in Los Feliz to City Lights Books (that was cool, with Dave Alvin, a Chinese man in tank top and shorts was drying a fish on the rooftop next door while Alvin was reading.) , Beyond Baroque and the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books to the acclaimed Literary Death Match freakout fandango.

His publishing record is all over the place as well: from being included as a writer in the the underground comic zine “HO!” in the 1990's to being published “Quarry West” a real lit mag to a spoken word CD out on NEW ALLIANCE RECORDS, JERUSALEM DONUTS, part of the Harvey Kubernick post punk Spoken Word revolution where no one lived or died, but alot of great poetry was recorded.

His DIY history includes six small tiny little books of poetry and other work with GLUESTICKPRESS: 20 Poems, Finished Product, Visions to Los Angeles, Die for Love, Gasoline 24 Hours, Queen Dandelion and other things, and Love Dog

Incommunicado Press published Abee’s first full collection of poetry and fiction King Planet in January of 1997 and his mad cataract of lyrical prose novel The Bus: Cosmic Ejaculations of the Daily Mind in Transit came out with Phony Lid Books in 2002. Write Bloody Books published his most recent collection of poetry in 2009, titled Great Balls of Flowers. His new novel, Johnny Future, is out now on MP Press. Go and buy this book!!!

Abee currently resides with his wife and daughters in El Sereno, Los Angeles and teaches 8th grade English for the Los Angeles Unified School District.